And I wonder where I got the impression that strcpy does forward copies.

That's why you don't learn C properly just by reading other peoples' code. You need to consult the final authority on the language, which is the language specification.

As for what a man page should include, I would have to agree with you, to some extent, in your last paragraph. However, I do not like the BUGS section in strtok(3) on GNU/Linux systems. "Never use this function, but if you do ..." Might as well just say "Never use C because it allows you to shoot yourself in the foot".

It's contradictory from the start, and then they go on to say that "These functions modify their first argument." This should be bloody obvious since they take a char *, and not a const char *.