I think board games on the more complex end are running into the fact that they're goddamn near impossible to teach, or to learn well enough to teach, without watching a demonstration or playing a couple demo rounds. A book alone is simply not sufficient without, as the linked PDF complains about, something like the effort of studying a textbook, probably with the game-pieces right alongside and working through fake play as you go so that any of it makes sense.
Attempts to translate that into extensive game walkthroughs in manuals (not quick examples of play to demonstrate a rule, which are sometimes nice) are horribly misguided. Just include a damn QR code that points to a YouTube video. Give it an entire page to make it more likely the players find it, that'll still be less space than a walkthrough.
I truly think Monopoly's around the upper end of complexity that normal people can be expected to absorb and apply from a game manual—not from someone showing them the right way, or from a video—which means the vast majority of modern-era games are way past that point. I've known more people who fail to play with all parts of the Monopoly rules than I've known people who correctly play with all of them (or at least know the rules, but affirmatively reject or deliberately modify them) by a large margin. Usually it's auctioning or mortgaging they skip, either because they never read the rules and learned from someone who wasn't familiar with those parts, or because they did read the rules but deemed one or both of those parts too daunting to play and manage without having seen a demonstration of it and decided the game seems like it can run without those rules (yes, it can, but it makes it worse in some key ways—not doing auctions when someone declines to purchase a space is especially harmful, as it prolongs the game without much in the way of compensatory extra fun)
Like, sure, Risk is kinda a shitty grand strategy or area control or war game or however you want to classify it, for demonstrable, if arguable, reasons, but if your answer to that results in more complex rules than Risk... you're gonna need an explainer video, because your rule book is definitely gonna suck. Because that's a game normal people can, just barely, often figure out and run correctly just from the rule book, and yours surely won't be.
Which is why many say there needs to be several rule books. You need the quick start summary page. You need the detailed reference book. You need the walk through example game. You probably should have the simplified rules for a quick game (with some limits so that the missing full rules are not needed).
Keep the rules, but ditch any lengthy written blow-by-blow account of a session of the game. They're painful to read and not terribly illuminating. The motivation is to replicate the sort of thing a video's good at, to make the rulebook a self-contained teaching device—"if watching a round of play is so useful, why don't we put that in the book!"—but it's just not gonna work. You need a video, someone to explain it to you, setting up the game and stepping through a couple fake turns with yourself, close reading of the rules with some note-taking and re-reading, that kind of thing. In short, you need a teacher (in person, or video) or good application of study skills. There is a Royal Road, but it's the former options (videos, teachers who already know the game) and you're not going to bring that to the rule book in just about any case that needs such a thing.
That's not likely to be a problem since these days every board game has a number of instructional videos (and that's in addition to video reviews, which typically show how a game works, though not in as much detail).
Attempts to translate that into extensive game walkthroughs in manuals (not quick examples of play to demonstrate a rule, which are sometimes nice) are horribly misguided. Just include a damn QR code that points to a YouTube video. Give it an entire page to make it more likely the players find it, that'll still be less space than a walkthrough.
I truly think Monopoly's around the upper end of complexity that normal people can be expected to absorb and apply from a game manual—not from someone showing them the right way, or from a video—which means the vast majority of modern-era games are way past that point. I've known more people who fail to play with all parts of the Monopoly rules than I've known people who correctly play with all of them (or at least know the rules, but affirmatively reject or deliberately modify them) by a large margin. Usually it's auctioning or mortgaging they skip, either because they never read the rules and learned from someone who wasn't familiar with those parts, or because they did read the rules but deemed one or both of those parts too daunting to play and manage without having seen a demonstration of it and decided the game seems like it can run without those rules (yes, it can, but it makes it worse in some key ways—not doing auctions when someone declines to purchase a space is especially harmful, as it prolongs the game without much in the way of compensatory extra fun)
Like, sure, Risk is kinda a shitty grand strategy or area control or war game or however you want to classify it, for demonstrable, if arguable, reasons, but if your answer to that results in more complex rules than Risk... you're gonna need an explainer video, because your rule book is definitely gonna suck. Because that's a game normal people can, just barely, often figure out and run correctly just from the rule book, and yours surely won't be.