I'm not the most technical person but I could easily understand the purpose of the program by quickly scanning the webpage. The combo "clear headline + demo screenshot" is all that's required to explain what the product features are, and how I, as a user, can benefit from this product. There is even a blob of text available under each screenshot, for those who want to know a little bit more. (Reminds of "The obvious, the easy, and the possible" [1])
A lot of landing pages of SaaS products and other tech-related websites could benefit a lot from this "old" but straightforward approach, instead of trying to sell you a better lifestyle with "Be productive" or "Break free" or "Solve all your issues" marketing headlines.
I think the reason this happens is because there is a belief that, and who knows maybe it's the truth, people buy emotionally. Business and marketing books (E-myth and How to win friends come to mind specifically) constantly parrot that "sales studies" and "marketing research" show that people buy, or this case download, with their feelings. This seems to lead people to add vacuous fluff to marketing pages to "appeal" to someone's emotions.
As you can tell by most of comment I think this isn't the whole truth and that really things live somewhere in the middle and that the domain and scope of interaction greatly shift this spectrum one way or another, picking a doctor/lawyer vs picking and IDE comes to mind for myself, YMMV with that example and might even further drive home the point.
Long story long, marketing is hard and the people doing the marketing often aren't domain experts and have to rely on the information passed to them through a convoluted game of telephone via authors and experts that can't even communicate everything needed to be effective because they themselves aren't good at teaching.
Yeah, love this! I hate when I can't figure out what a software or service does from their homepage.
Looking at oxide.computer... man... what DO they do? Do they sell servers?
My other pet peeve for these kind of websites is when the landing page is full of just release notes and links to tangentially related articles news articles and talks about the product, and it takes me 10 minutes to figure out where I can actually read about what the heck product I'm even looking at, and why I would use it over other products in its class.
This XKCD about uni websites gives the general gist of what I'm talking about https://xkcd.com/773/
Some Github repos are also awful. The README should summarize what the product is or link to a website that does.
It's hard to find some really terrible ones right now...
Apache products tend to take some effort to decipher what it is they even do or how they'd be used. They have a nice summary description like the start of a man page, but that's about it.
https://ant.apache.org/https://hadoop.apache.org/
The GitHub landing page is surprisingly worse than you'd expect. It's not terrible... but check it out in Incognito / Private Window and imagine you'd never heard of GitHub:
https://github.com/
Compare the above, with how cleanly and clearly Travis-CI manages to express what it does, and why you would use them, along with a useful screenshot of what the UI looks like right near the top of the page, so you can get an idea of what it would be like to use in practice:
https://travis-ci.org/
Pictures illustrating exactly what it does, something many people/organizations cough oxide.computer cough don't do properly.