This is the manual-read which saved someone's life
Not on your level of sophistication, but the "stripped" diagram was what conveyed what the things do and how they work.
A few days later a boatperson got caught in the bight / loops of their own rope on a nearly 30m work-boat... I knew the fingers of one hand had more digits than there were seconds for whatever needed to be done to have been done...
Having seen that diagram, I knew the answer in that moment - get along, hail the skipper and get the boat to power astern into the current until the boatperson could climb out of their own rope.
Manuals can be the raw information source which provides "the penny drops" moment.
----------------------------------- Shifting to neutral would still have allowed the propeller to continue to pull in the rope from the current flow?
Understanding the electrical schematic of my car saved me from a lawsuit. It was a habit acquired from designing automotive electronics test equipment. I also quickly realized that a leaking thermostat was why the torque converter wouldn't lock up in cruise on my present car.
I saw that the low fuel level sensor was a negative temperature coefficient (NTC) thermistor (variable resistor) on the fuel pump in series with the dash warning lamp. Immersion in fuel kept the thermistor cool and high resistance, when exposed it would heat up, the resistance drop, and the current rise enough to light the bulb, which then limited the current and further heating.
That process had been claimed to be a trade secret of the previous employer of the developers of the machine I was working on, though the thermistor maker had published how to design it, a tricky balance of temperature, varying resistance and heat loss to air or liquid. Heat conductivity tapped into my Chemistry and Physics training, the power division between variable loads in series is a Calculus problem.
The lawyer asked me innocent questions at first and then where I got the idea for my no-moving-parts liquid level detector circuit to which I could immediately answer "Oh, that's how my car's low fuel light works", which cleared me of the Intellectual Property theft charge. The rest of the lawsuit crippled the company and ended the project. I had lost the previous job the same way. The cost and distraction of fighting a suit is enough to ruin a small company putting its resources into new product development, whether they would win or lose.