I doubt they worried about being condescending, lots of people fear that the official documentation will be too difficult and never read it. The logic is that the docs are arcana written by witches that know how to write programming languages, and the tutorials are written by regular girls that had to struggle to understand the language instead of the syntax just appearing on their heads.

I pretty much learned how to program from the official Python tutorial. I had been struggling for years before that; I had some notions but I couldn't put together anything really useful. The Python docs got me over the hump precisely because of what OP said: it starts from 0 and builds up until you have enough tools to write whatever project you have in mind. I imagine that having had to design and reason everything about the language actually gives the writer a great sense of how it fits together and what the logical increments are.

Since then I always go first to whatever the language designers wrote; for example K&R's The C Programming Language, the Rust book, the Postgresql manual, etc, and only once I feel that I know enough I complement it with other sources.

This approach extends to libraries as well: first I read whatever official docs there are, then I search the source code for the functionality I need to learn about, and only if that fails I look elsewhere.

It seems like a slow method but it's so reliable that it works out for me. After a while of doing this you become the reference and people come ask you questions.