[0] https://nedbatchelder.com/text/bigo.html
[1] https://nedbatchelder.com/blog/201711/toxic_experts.html
I'll double down on my toxicity by saying I didn't like the page layout. As someone with ADHD (and a declining memory), I need to be led through formatting/sub-headings/bullets/colored sections/etc into each detail or it all blends together into a wall of text. The longer it takes to make a point (visually and conceptually), the more lost I am. I couldn't easily follow it. The Simple Wikipedia page was more straight to the point (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation), but reading the "full" Wikipedia page thrusts you headlong into a lot of math, which to me signifies that this shit is more complex than it seems and simplifying it is probably a bad idea.
Ask yourself why. The usual answer is that top experts either can't be bothered to create better content, or they actively gatekeep, believing that their field must remain hard to learn and the riff-raff must be kept out.
I think the first step is to accept that laypeople can have legitimate interest in certain topics and deserve accessible content. The remedy to oversimplified explanations is to write something better - or begrudgingly accept the status quo and not put people down for attempts that don't meet your bar.
It's also good to ponder if the details we get worked up about actually matter. Outside the academia, approximately no one needs a precise, CS-theoretical definition of big-O notation. Practitioners use it in a looser sense.
The more detail that’s included, the harder it becomes to write less. If you ask me to write 500 words on indexing strategies for an RDBMS, I’ll probably manage, but very little will be explained. If you ask me to write 5000 words, there’s no way I’ll hit that target, because I’ll want to explain every tangent, every fundamental, and so on.
The single best blog [series] that manages to pull this off, IMO, is Jeremy Cole’s series on InnoDB [0]. It’s not short taken as a whole, but each article is short enough that it (probably) meets people’s attention spans. I think the thing that makes it so great to me is that it’s written assuming that the reader already understands certain concepts. For example, he doesn’t spend multiple paragraphs explaining what a B+tree is; he links to the Wikipedia page, and then describes how InnoDB uses them.
In contrast, when I write something, I usually find myself assuming that the reader doesn’t have some fundamental knowledge. I usually try to either put it in a section that’s easily skipped, or in a pop-out toggle, but either way, it’s there.
To me, these fundamentals are incredibly important, because a. they’re how I understand things b. I don’t feel that you can operate something to its fullest capability (let alone fix it) if you don’t know how the thing works.
Re: gatekeeping, to me the perfect example is the Linux kernel. Torvalds is notoriously unfriendly, and while you can judge that however you’d like, the man has a massive weight on his shoulders, and letting code in that doesn’t meet his standards threatens that weight. I get it. Then, I also came of age during the RTFM era, so I’m used to it.