@piers : of course it is a choice, but for some people it might seem it isn’t a choice at all.
They lack the information and confidence to skip such things.
This is in part their experience with whatever local community they have and part the advertising for various systems.
The SF and Fantasy counterparts seem just that bit more aware of the need to provide this info.

Maybe it is because history has such high availability in educational format and not enough in the ‘fun’ variant ?
I’m sure that both Saving Private Ryan and the Band of Brothers series were responsible for triggering the interest in WW2 as opposed to the more boring actual books and documentaries about the same event.

I know how alien the Battlegroup books were to me when I first encountered them.
It took a while to make the switch and grok what they were about. Now I’m at a stage where I wonder what a ‘cold war gone hot’ book in Battlegroup format would be like before I think of any other systems …
To make that kind of switch takes effort and (as I said) not everyone has the motivation or resources to do so.

I also know that SF and Fantasy games can take a bit to get used to.
I know there are video games where I don’t have a clue what the weapons are like, because I can’t make sense of their strenghts and weaknesses. And then there’s others where it just clicks and the alien becomes as familliar as the ‘real world’ stuff. Sometimes that’s even within a game itself where one factions’ weapons & troops are a bit too weird to understand. (I think this sort of misunderstanding is why people complain about how certain things are too weak or too powerful … they simply don’t get the context in which they are used).