Nope :) The joke was referring to the fact that the GNU Project (and thus the Bash project) insists on writing their documentation in the Texinfo format.
IIRC for a while they used to have man pages that basically said “just read the Info pages instead”. This is not the case anymore, in Linux distros these days even the GNU tools have decent man pages.
Anyway, the Bash manual is actually written in the Texinfo format. It’s not so bad, to be honest :)
A large portion of them are just auto-generated from the `--help` output (and --help has always been fairly high quality for GNU tools). Perhaps with a few extra paragraphs sprinkled in.
I've found that GNU man pages are often an unhappy medium between the terseness of `--help` and the verbose explanations in the info manuals; and so the GNU man pages are almost never what I want. If I want to just quickly look something up, the man pages are too big and I should have used --help, and if I want to understand something they're too brief and I should have used info.
That said, the Bash man page is great (as is the info page). It's always amazed me that the Bash maintainer (Chet Ramey) goes through the trouble of maintaining two entirely separate documents with such detail and quality.
Amusingly "info bash" took me to the man page until a separate bash-doc package was installed. One day I'm going to write a script to automatically install missing "-doc" packages and learn to navigate info.
IIRC for a while they used to have man pages that basically said “just read the Info pages instead”. This is not the case anymore, in Linux distros these days even the GNU tools have decent man pages.
Anyway, the Bash manual is actually written in the Texinfo format. It’s not so bad, to be honest :)
https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/