Well, that's the trouble then. Just like the person that recommended
reading the LDP Kernel Howto - these things are just plain out of
date, and will always be out of date.
The advantage of having short help text in the configuration file
itself is that it will be much harder to get out of date. That is,
any new configuration option will have to come with some help text
initially. Anyone changing an option will likely see the help text
nearby in the configuration file and thus be more likely to update
it at the same time.