Unfortunately I don't think I know the answers to your questions. I do what you say: open one or multiple tabs in my terminal emulator if I need to read multiple parts at the same time. I press / and then type in some case-sensitive text if I want to search for occurrences of this text. Or I press ? and some text to search backwards. And the rest I "lamely" do with pressing up-down arrows...

Learning by example is exactly the second layer I'm referring to in my text above. Man pages are very... formal. If I don't yet understand what they even talk about, I need examples before their concepts become "native" to me.

I can't "teach" well really - but I'm explaining how this works for me. I used to hate man pages, now I love them. Even a very difficult one like man bash. There is a point in the learning curve where it gets a lot better...