Well, it does help that "being a decent human being" correlates quite nicely with "being a better gamer", almost as if not being a giant tool helps out in all sort of social situations.
For sure. But most gaming advice doesn't go quite that far lol, it's usually really practical approaches to situations or ways of dealing with problem players or the like.
You can laugh and ridicule my position all you want, I stand my ground: Respecting people's opinion and trying to find common ground when conflict arises are very basic social skills
A gaming rulebook IS NO PLACE to teach people about that.
Not disagreeing with your decision to disengage, but I personally don't think this "no place" is a reasonable position, supported by any kind of logic. I guess we'll never know the exact reasoning.
Even if people try to respect the opinions of others and find common ground, like, innately, or because they were raised well, they don't always have great tools to do it, or to do it in a gaming situation. I've seen this in action, even. I actually learned a ton about resolving conflicts and managing a group from running RPGs, which I've used IRL for things like being foreman on a jury, running meetings at work, and so on. Some of what I learned I might eventually have figured out myself, but some suggestions in rulebooks got me there a lot quicker. I've seen it with others, too, but that's a long story. Tools make people more capable.
As an aside, I'd note not all suggestions in rulebooks for this kind of thing are good, but they're ideas, that you can use. What I found was that I often came across an idea, suggestion or approach, even a mandated one (rarely) and my initial reaction was often to reject it, but I'd think about it, and sometimes I'd later see how that would actually be useful. Further, some RPGs really only work well if you're willing to adopt a particular approach that may be at odds with how you DM normally (particularly PtbA and FitD). There's still some advice that was just bad of course - I'm thinking of some 1E and 2E World of Darkness Storyteller books which would have like, several chapters with basically good or ok advice, and then there'd be one which was basically silly. But they're tools you can use or not, generally speaking, and where they are mandated or strongly suggested, there's usually an actual game-function-related reason.
(Memorably on the "bad advice" front, there was a big RIFTS book which I think gave pretty good DM advice, and then gave an example of play where the guy who wrote the advice just completely did the opposite lol. Either that or the reverse, but I think it was that way around. It was pretty funny either way.)
I accept you're not going to respond, note, but I'm putting this here in case others want to discuss any of this. Thanks for the conversation (no sarcasm).