This isn't to excuse it. But to give you a map of a sort. I know it sucks as a new person, and similarly I know this is way too long for a simple guide. It's complex, at least, for the parts where people don't mean to be (ykwim) but still are/come off as it, and at least knowing how it happens might help navigate/dodge some of it.

You're right to be frustrated and angry about it. Please keep being frustrated and angry about it, because that's how change happens. That's not to say the burden is on you to keep complaining until things are fixed, but that when it happens, be annoyed about it.

tl;dr:

1. linux support is largely a gift-labor 'industry' with plenty of people exploiting that
2. on windows, companies have done the install path enough and troubleshooted enough that they have support flows for that usually. Linux does not because there's too many ways to do things, and too low a population, so they just don't bother.
3. the other 600 randos this month getting ornery that the free support wasn't as fast or detailed or broken-down as corporate support means people will false-positive a lot.
4. the problem with linux support forum regulars is they're forum regulars, with all the problems that causes and how it makes everything into game of thrones for who's the coolest in the member list page no one looks at but them.
5. you're right to be frustrated and angry about it. please keep being frustrated and angry about it, because that's how this changes.
6. it used to be so much worse. I know that doesn't help, but maybe it'll help plot the curve, so to speak.

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Elitism and frustration with the last 400 commenters tends to look the same

one of the biggest problems with linux atm is that often to fix some minor edge case you need to suddenly learn how to use 3 new tools you've never heard of that most of the things written for are for people more advanced than you. But as time goes on, more and more of that goes away -- there's still the same number of things you run into, sure. Maybe more. But that's because people have been slowly, agonizingly, usually just with their spare time, improving things to make them more friendly to a lower and lower linux-knowledge audience. (As a side effect, this is also an attention economy, not just a gift economy, in terms of what gets explicit paths vs like, some guy on reddit's post from six years ago

a lot of the reason there's what on the surface appears to be and feels like elitism (not that there isn't also actual elitism going on) is that none of the resources to make any of the intermediary steps better exist yet (it's slow progress), mixed with the fact that it's a spare-time gift-building ecosystem, mixed with the fact that most users don't understand how much the support work actually takes since ~no one remembers how they did something off the top of their head and they're googling the pieces to try and get something working from what they remember. So they ask questions that require a lot of labor and then most disappear forever, and people start to lump everyone into that if they don't instantly present everything needed. Which isn't fair, but you can see how it happens.

Support takes effort since there's so many ways to do things and so many ways you can fix things, and so much depends on what else is on your computer.

Which means that a lot of replies are using their free time to try and look for how to do it with their knowledge of what probably worked for them / will work, but don't know where you're at in your like, knowing-the-ecosystem-or-cli journey, and when people get defensive about it being too advanced the person writing support gets defensive (but don't articulate it well) because they put often significant time into the reply.

It took me a long time to realize that. Even after I'd done the giving-support loop for others a few times.

There was a golden age when many people in the US had more time and/or more money you could exchange for time, and a lot of the support articles / etc that were written in the late 00s and early 2010s show that. But the squeeze hits everyone, and people just have less free time to donate now. its a reflection of capitalism, not unique to this.

gift-industries

That's not to say there's plenty of elitism, but the majority of linux support, like the majority of open source software, is people putting a gift out on a sidewalk that says "free to a good home", with a lot of people just taking that labor for granted -- support labor, package maintenance labor, open source software in general. Which has these issues and no one actually verbalizes it, it's just vibes. It's not great, but you see the same with people asking for mod support on windows, etc. It's part of the ecosystem until there's less people just coming by, asking for what turns out to be a ton of support work, and disappearing like the last 30 this week once it's fixed.

they may not be able to provide more detail even, so many years after knowing the depth isn't helping.

as eevee mentions, the abundance of free software that's free because of advertising or data collection, "community editions", "subscribe for more features but it's free", and ubiquitous piracy means a lot of people are alienated from the labor that goes into things, the cost of a "simple change".

The corps are so big they now can give away their software as, basically, an industrial byproduct. "our profits are so high that you using this and talking about it is free advertising from what otherwise we'd just throw in the trash".

hundreds of millions of dollars of paid hours buys a lot of patience, and a lot of making intermediate steps invisible or easier. a lot of support documentation that has the time to consider how a new user would have to approach it, instead of how they did when writing it. I'm not saying it makes it better that people are more standoffis

Elitism

A good chunk of the "true" elitism is people covering their lack of knowledge in the area / lack of ability to break it into steps / lack of ability to think about the entire chain of steps a new user would need. It's a problem.

Another chunk of it is, well, support forum regulars are still "forum regulars". They still all stalk the 'latest post' section and will answer it even if they barely know things about it. they'll defend their gaps by deflecting because they think other forum regulars will think they're stupid if they say the wrong thing. most of them are like 17. It's a forum thing and I wish we'd move more things away from that model. You gotta think of them like discords. Often reddit is better. Somehow the manjaro forum has less of this but I can't recommend the distribution because of the weird decisions their maintainers keep making.

and yeah that part still sucks, though quite a few are working on making various bits better still. But most of the more-niche things are spare-time labor, not valued by the corps or foundations, so it's slow. It's why gaming took so long to work well before valve dumped huge amounts of paid engineer labor into it.

There's all sorts of elitism but you can avoid it once you learn the types of places and people. You shouldn't have to. But people like that tend to dominate spaces in ways that excise them, and, well, most forums reward the behavior just by their layout. But the rant about a 'latest posts' category is another 30 pages long so I'm not putting it here.

and then there's the elitists who mean it. You usually meet them on social media (or youtube, and twitch) these days so the most people can see how smart they are and how unable they are to break concepts down into a way less experienced people can understand. I never understood showing one's ass to the whole world like that, but apparently it's a great way to build a youtube following. They used to be contained in irc bickering with each other, but then freenode.net self-destructed