I totally agree! I also very much appreciate the amount of time they dedicate to explaining the details of the apparatus. I suspect that very few physics students get any reasonable amount of instruction on experimental techniques these days. I barely did fifteen years ago, and I think things have only gotten worse since then. Without that, the learning curve of working in a research lab can be pretty brutal.

A second benefit I get from spending all that time on the apparatus is kind of paradoxical: those extra details seem like they would distract you from learning and understanding the core concept, but somehow they make things much more approachable. The idealized experiment is slightly too abstract to easily digest.