Agreed that it would be nice, but exactly how much of the work of becoming educated are you willing to ask this person to do on your behalf?

If they are as educated on these topics as they claim, adding references is a trivial matter and generally greatly improves the value of the work.

I am going to disagree with you there. I have physical copies of a couple books I recommend and making them easily referenced can be a bit of a pain - not difficult but may be not worth the effort if I was compiling a list of topics to serve as my general answer to a question I receive frequently

It’s not hard to drop a title and an author at all. I heavily disagree.

Ok, where is your personal list of important topics to understand <field>? I'd like to check that you properly referenced every recommendation.

I think my real gripe here is the implicit demand for more free labor from some one else. We're talking references here, we both know its not a huge deal if you already have your reference manager fired up, but in the context of this thread the note of 'needs references' feels like a demand/like some kind of obviously missing thing vs a neutral observation that it would make a thing better.

Kinda like if some one makes a cake and when you get a slice all you say is 'needs strawberries'. Maybe y'aint wrong, still rude though.

The effort required is minimal. Here, watch!

Linear algebra is important! Check out Linear Algebra Done Right by Axler.

If the author can’t do this minimal extra step then I question why they’re writing their post since they’re either unqualified or don’t really care about helping people.

Yeah, but perhaps they should have written/published this in a form such that others can add references.

Holy hell, thats an idea with legs. Why dont you make that and send it their way?