As I said, for new players I do recommend they play clueless characters.
And sure, "some basic info" will be in the player handout. But, it's about useless. Even just a small town, the players won't get more then a paragraph of things. And a single paragraph won't tell you much about a town at all. To just scratch the surface you'd need a 500 page guide book, a 500 page who is who and a 500 page history book. And the player would have to read and memorize all that before the game. And for a city, it's more like a 2000 page book....
That, obviously, is overkill.
But basic lore and history of the world-region-realm should IMO be available to the players in a form they can access outside of game sessions (a website is handy here); and if the campaign is to be set mostly in-around a specific town or city some basic lore about that would be useful as well.
Even just a short gazetteer listing each realm or nation in the area, the major cities or towns or locales within that realm, what type of culture it is, what species generally live there, who the current ruler or head of state is (if such info is widely known), and so forth is a good start.
"
Pomfrey is a monarchy roughly based on War-of-the-Roses era England. Mostly Human with a scattering of Hobbits. Knights in shining armour are more common here than almost anywhere else, and the Cavalier class originated out of this culture of noble chivalry. Main city (and by far the largest in the whole northlands) is Waterdown, pop. 85,000; this city is considerably more cosmopolitan than the rest of the nation and many species can be found here. Pomfrey is at almost constant war with Rellham, its culturally very similar neighbour to the east; yet both nations share Waterdown as their capital. Current rulers: King William and Queen Charlotte."
To me, that's enough to give a quickie overview of Pomfrey should a player be curious either in or out of character. If Waterdown turns out to be or become important I'd obviously have to flesh it out a lot further.
For the nation the campaign starts or is based in, more detail than this is required; particularly historical detail to explain how things got to where they are today.
Whether or not the players ever read any of this is irrelevant to the fact that by putting it out there where they
can read it, I've done my job.