This should be on the manual! 
Maybe there’s an issue of information overload. There’s tons of ways to do things, but how to choose the right one?
I did go and watch the Mike Dane’s videos on YouTube, and I realized what you mentioned: that tiny subset of required files. I had not heard of baseof.html, but with that I’ll be able to remove much redundancy from my site. I would have preferred a 10 minutes condensed video (too many fill-in words) or even a written post (“from zero to a hugo blog in 15 minutes”). But now I understand what was missing. A pity I couldn’t figure it out from the official docs.