You’re right, but I do think that at times PP does a bad job of explaining things to players.
They’re getting better at it, partly because I and other members of the CC call them out any time we think things aren’t being made clear enough - the pop-up tooltips were the devs’ (very good) response to that.
And actually, the Tutorial took my suggestion and tells everyone right up front that they won’t be able to do everything and will need to invest in Research Labs. But as many players ignore that as listen to it.
Which is one (of many) reasons why I wrote my Helpful Hints for XCOM Players (Phoenix point: some helpful hints for xcom players)