I don't think it's a pointless restriction. It's like saying that a monster's stats in tabletop might as well be visible to all since you could just look it up.
Yes, people who want to get through every encounter as easily as possible will just look it up. People who have TROUBLE with an encounter will look it up. But I can tell you that I, personally, would not look it up right away.
...so don't look it up.
I fail do see the problem here.
If you think Examine gives you too much information, don't use Examine.
You control the buttons you press.
The problem with that is that sometimes some effects are clearly visible and they translate into very important buffs / debuffs. There is no way to actually read their tooltip without examining - these are things that a character living in that world should know or realize immediately, but without access to a tooltip we cannot. If we could read tooltips while hovering over characters and holding ALT or something I would agree with you, but sometimes Examine is necessary to see how conditions translate into gameplay (because it's far from obvious without examining).
I think D:OS2 did this very well - it really wasn't hard to have a Loremaster in the group. There were items that gave bonuses to the skill, and a single point in Loremaster gave you almost complete information about all very common enemies - dude's wearing heavy armor and a polearm, you can expect... etc. With an extra point or two (maybe just from items) you'd get valuable information for the less common enemies. It was great, imo. The option to completely ignore Loremaster and just take a look at the wiki was always there and will always be there, if people choose to play like that.
