I love D&D 5e and I can say with confidence that I've never played the game the way it's meant to be played. I recently started DMing out of that frustration.

So, in my session zero i made it a point to establish that players were responsible for learning the rules, that we would stop the game to look up rules as often as necessary. I was convinced that the convenience of having it all in a digital platform would help keep the game running smoothly.

I suspect that the opposite is true.

During character creation players select class and race from a drop-down menu. It shows a brief description but the two or three pages of lore and explanations get skipped xvideos.

Exotic options get mixed with classic options without context.

You get a spell's name and description, but you're not shown how spellcasting works.

For gear you get absolutely nothing except range, damage, and some tags.

D5D beyond is what hooked me into 5e. It's a great resource. But it also facilities scanning and cherry-picking. I consider myself tech-savvy and an early adopter, but if I ever run 5e again, it'll be BYOB (bring your own book).

I fell in love with D&D by flipping through a 3.5 core book a coworker left in their desk. I found myself reading the bits of lore and looking at the pictures over and over again. I think that magic is gone.

D&D is far from perfect. I am aware that the text is bloated and complicated. The game sets out to achieve too much. Most people don't have time for that. And brand recognition and peer pressure means people never try simpler games. But if players put in the effort it wouldn't be as bad as many think.

I would agree, new players really should be going through the newbie guide to get at least the basics of game mechanics.  Clarification can be done as you play, but the new player guide does offer a fair bit of information.  A complete lack of understanding anything will REALLY drag down the first handful of sessions, so players taking some time to TRY and understand is always a good idea.  Blowing through character creation if you don't know the base rules isn't very helpful, as it is assumed you have a basic understanding of mechanics before creating your character.  Less a shortfall of the site or anything else than a failing of players.

There is also a brief playthrough one can do to get the very basics down but it seems to be buried deep as I can't find the link now.  Mods/Admins, maybe the introduction adventure thing could be put into the New Player Guide as a clearly visible, easy-to-find link?  It's brief but gives a good description of several adventuring things that would be a big help to someone who's never played before.

Using dndbeyond as a useful resource for the rules would also require the Search facility to actually provide meaningful results, rather than giving you a long list of creatures which reference a rule before you get to the actual rule itself.

The problem isn't D&D Beyond. You're relying on the character builder to have everything you're meant to know. That is not the purpose of the character builder. It has reminders but is not there to learn from. It is meant for you to make a character after you have read the rules and descriptions.

You need the compendium for reading stuff. For quick reference of races, feats, spells etc then use the Game Rules menu. For full stuff, like the Basic Rules, PHB, and y'know, the stuff you're meant to read before making a character - use the Sources menu.

Think of it this way, do you give peeps a character sheet and say learn from this? No. You hand them the PHB/books and when they've learned and ready to make a character you hand them the sheet to fill in. So likewise you should be telling your players to read the PHB/Basic Rules/etc on here and when ready, they can then use the builder to make their character sheet.

It isn't D&D Beyond's fault you're skipping steps and using tools for the wrong purpose. 

I think the OP has a point, though.  I've played in several groups and its clear that there should be a better defined "onboarding" process for players who don't own the PHB.  Because Net 2.0 has increased the speed of transactions, facilitated the shortening of attention spans, and increased the embedded linking of pages without also facilitating the gradual lesson planning to check whether concepts introduced are actually retained, people who exclusively use a portal like DDB are less likely than people who reference a physical book or even a well organized PDF to jump through the necessary hoops to learn (for instance) the difference between an action, a bonus action, and a reaction, or what the heck a Ritual is.

It's true that a character sheet does not provide the necessary rules information. But it's also true that new DMs who mainly do online play are often themselves not very familiar with the website's tutorial capabilities.   The thing is that when you play ONLY online D&D, it's easy to think of it as a sort of player-interaction video game. This presents a problem because it is NOT a video game, but new DMs need to make a conceptual leap to understand the differences between facilitating play for an online-only D&D player who is used to video games with mandatory tutorials versus facilitating games for people who have played the game in person or whose introduction to the game was through the PHB.  The point is that the onboarding process for players has not kept pace with the increased online presence of D&D for people who do not own the PHB because learning something by reading a book is qualitatively different from learning something only through websites.  The format is different and thus the brain makes connections between different bits of information differently.

(By the way, the tendency for people to treat online D&D as a more interactive video game will only get worse once VTTs become more standard.)

All you need to actually play is Basic  D&D, which is found both in PDF and on DDB. But best remains to use books to play that's my opinion.

Quote from Song_of_Blues >>

(By the way, the tendency for people to treat online D&D as a more interactive video game will only get worse once VTTs become more standard.)

 This is probably a topic for another thread, but I fear this is already the case. One of my players (good friend) is convinced that TTRPGs are barely different to video games.

Not only that, but I believe it to be one of the main reasons why there's a DM shortage. New players come into the game expecting it to be like a video game, then proceed to exprect the DM to effectively work as a meat computer, a mere CPU to run the game on. And I believe it to be worse than just rules lawyer-ing.

There's an expectation that the DM exists to facilitate an experience for the players, rather than to cooperatively build a story together. That, and the fact that the new rules tend to cater almost exclusively to the players (such as giving them a wealth of mechanical options, which they then expect the DM to allow, and which in turn puts a tonne of extra pressure on said DM), and you've got a system that everyone wants to play, but nobody wants to DM for.

There's an excellent video I found recently that explains the situation in a much more conscience manner than I could. I'll see if I can find it and provide a link. The gist of it, is that newer systems put an immense amount of responsibility on GMs, but only provide them with a tiny amount of authority.

I'll make a new thread with a link to the video.