Games are an opportunity for not only entertainment but to educate people.
Except this particular game is - despite its setting being historical - not an attempt to model reality but to re-create (!) a fantasy, which has its origin in at least two different media. And both othese points of origin didn't have a very "intimate" relationship with reality:
1) The pirate fiction of the Golden Age of Pirarcy was basicially a form of advertisment for pirate hunters and colonial ventures; As such the accounts were often comissioned to widely overstate the danger of the acutal work to convince either the royals or investors commissioning the captains and ships for more favourable pay or conditions for their contracts. And of course, not mention that many witnesses would distort their accounts for social prestige.
The
A General History of Pyrates (the most known source on the Golden Age of Piracy) being a notable exception due to the strong possibilty of Jacobite (=dissident) authorship, which points a different kind of distortion for intent.
2) The modern pirate fiction in film, which sacrificed being nautrically accurate for what was the most feasible (and in many cases, cheapest) possible version to film while also being a compelling and accessible tableau for the viewing audience.
(Note: I cannot comment on Adventure Novels as much, due to the lack of insight into genre as a whole)
That being said,
Skull and Bones has not just the right to be that but it might also be compelled by its nature as a game to be so.
You don't have to follow me on my views on realism as stylistic choice (tl;dr: technically impressive yet, by comparison, often low on content ), accuracy as part of artistic intent (tl;dr: the lowest form, easily overuled by other considerations), or the question if modern art works can still be complete in themselves (tl;dr: they cannot), but please hear me out on this one.
As a game it has to make its systems at least partially understandble to the player to enable an act of Play; As the game takes player input, the player has at least minimal knowledge regarding what that input is to enable an agency at Play.
One way to confer that knowledge is to reference previously known information, e.g. the way a naval combat scene in a pirate movie plays out. For this to work, of course you have to reference a piece of information that is common knowledge to be most effective, the more obscure the piece of knowledge is the less effective this strategy will be (unless of course, you laser-focus your audience). Basically, you skip a technically explaination with "you have seen this before, so you know how it goes".
The opposite is of course an option, giving the player an intricate rule book and let them run the show. However in that chase, unlike in the case state above, you are asking the player to make a time investment up front to engage with the rulebook, at least in part, before any gameplay makes sense.
When in a scenario that you also have to make compelling argument for spending time with your game instead of another one, the strategy that make the player invest themselves and their time more gradually probably wins out.
EDIT:
Afterthough: You can, of course, also subvert expectations which you have build up by the reference to known information; which is a point I previously left out.