If you had tried it on an actual Unix system, your experience would have been rather different. AT&T Unix System 5 Release 3.2 had a standalone help command that provided an interactive menu-driven help system. It looked something like this:

    $ help
    help:   UNIX System On-line Help

        Choices      description 
        s            starter: general information

        l            locate:find a command with keyword

        u            usage: information about command 

        g            glossary: definition of terms 

        r            redirect to a file or a command 
        q            Quit
    Enter choice >

One of my first tasks as a systems programmer for the Schlumberger corporation in 1986 was to rewrite the VMS help command for use on SunOS. As it turns out, my rewritten version ran nearly twice as fast as the VMS version on VMS.

That design (a nested heirarchy of help topics/subtopics, with some navigation hacks to make getting around easier) was quite good.

But then came hypertext in the form of the web, and at that point, the "help" command just looks like crap.

That's because 'help' on most Linux-based systems is actually a shell builtin which explains other shell builtin commands. This, in turn, is related to the fact that Linux-based systems are flexible - you could use a totally different shell which does not even have the _help_ builtin - while VMS was a comprehensive single-sourced top-down controlled system. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, the fact that you are nearly certain to be using several Linux instances right at this moment gives some indication of which of these systems eventually turned out to be the strongest, warts and all.

help on VMS wasn't a builtin. It was a system-provided program, with data files that could be accessed via other software.

The same was true on MS-DOS, DR-DOS, and OS/2. Microsoft provided a help file compiler with some of its DOS development tools, and IBM provided an INF/HLP compiler and (if memory serves correctly) a message file compiler with the OS/2 SDK (HELP using both hypertext help files and message files on OS/2).

In a normal sized terminal the most useful part is pushed away by the list of built-in commands. IMO it should be printed last, so that it's guaranteed to be displayer to a user who doesn't know how to scroll up:

    GNU bash, version 5.0.18(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
    These shell commands are defined internally.  Type `help' to see this list.
    Type `help name' to find out more about the function `name'.
    Use `info bash' to find out more about the shell in general.
    Use `man -k' or `info' to find out more about commands not in this list