My rather sarcastically expressed point came from the impression that you were kind of bean counting hours on a level that I find too "micro". Could have perceived it wrongly, sure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The OP however did say that going through the template onboarding process didn't seem to net them any valuable knowledge.

From that vantage point you can very easily argue that requiring the personal touch, while not efficient because it's taking away productive time from other team member(s), has the biggest impact on the newly onboarding employee, and might end up being the least inefficient time expenditure during onboarding. I (and I think OP) claim that this is often true.

I found myself in a similar situation several times while complying 100% with the onboarding processes. I can confidently say 95% of them were completely useless for my day-to-day work. I didn't mind e.g. security guidelines and some company history (I did actually find them quite fascinating, contrary to what I thought before entering the meetings) but after 1-2 weeks of onboarding I found myself practically unprepared for my day-to-day technical work.

...And then I ended up needing personal attention from 2 team members anyway because I was progressing at a snail's pace -- because super important institutional knowledge was scattered among 30+ repositories (and the info was often not even in the README files but buried in a long code comment somewhere). Not to mention critically important ops details that were blocking further progress were impossible for me to obtain until a team member figured they'll finally reply with details they can look up in maximum 2 minutes.

So what was my gain from the template onboarding process? Practically zero. I would have been interested in most of the onboarding meetings and live tutorials after I worked for the company for 3-6 months because quite frankly, and looking back and analyzing it, they would have been very valuable then and NOT right at the start.

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I suppose the right question for us to debate here is: are you confident that new team members needing your time is more unproductive than letting them fumble and trying to feel their way in, resulting in very low productivity for months?

At least from my experience the answer is a firm "NO". You can call me stupid or non-self-starter or unable to read other people's code or anything else if you like -- but I did end up learning everything I needed (eventually). However, every separate key insight came after days (sometimes after two weeks!) of trial and error and getting scolded on standups in the manner of "no no no, do not do it like that, but I won't tell you how". And I am pretty sure that each and every one of these key insights could have been provided by (in total, not for each one) maximum 3 voice chats a week, complemented with screen share and generally just showing you the ropes.

But the team was never bothered to do it even though I calculated that the time "wasted" for them would have been roughly 3.0 - 3.5 hours a week for no more than a month, so 12 - 15 hours for an entire month.

Was that too big a price to pay for recruiting a strong helping hand in your team? To them apparently it was. But it did no favours to the companies we parted ways with because both me and them ended up very frustrated about how long did the "self-starter" style onboarding take. So they ended up wasting money for which they received zero value, and I paid an opportunity cost in lost career growth and maybe a potentially amazing long-term job.

Nobody won, everybody lost. The root cause was this bean counting of hours.