The crazed emacs zealot part is opinion obviously, but info was created by the GNU project as a successor to man.

The idea was to provide something like man pages but with more structure, so they could have tables of contents, indices, or just links from one section to another. Also, there was a format called texinfo that could be processed into either printable PDFs or info pages, so your printed documentation could always be in sync with your online docs.

Also, emacs has a dedicated info mode for easily navigating info pages within the editor.

I quite like info and wish it had cought on, but it didn’t and now no one really uses it. Also, we have things like html and pandoc now, which provide most of the same benefits and are less obscure