Kata are the textbook of karate (?)

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In the last fortnight, I think I have seen people use a variant of the phrase "kata are the textbook of karate" at least a couple of dozen times.  It is a claim that instantly gets a lot of likes on social media and generally has a couple of follow-ups such as "kata contain all the techniques", "kata are the bible of karate" and "everything you need to know comes from the kata".  Which sounds great and seems like a justification of doing kata as the primary mode of training.

But.

How do kata transmit this knowledge?  How are they a textbook?  Without interpretation or guidance from someone or something that understands the context of each movement sequence, they teach nothing.  The teacher and ancillary training - especially with a partner provide the context and the understanding. The kata is there to support the learning that takes place, not provide the learning.

This isn't my idea, by the way.  Patrick McCarthy talks about it with his Matsuyama Koen hypothesis of kata creation.  According to this perspective, kata are the culmination of learning, not the beginning.  It is only in the modern (post 1920s) era that karate training has inverted itself.  There is plenty of other evidence out there to support this viewpoint regarding kata, as well as this perspective making sense of the often confusing structure that kata have.

So, if kata aren't the textbook, what are they?  To me, modern kata represent someone's crib-notes that have been handwritten, passed to someone else, used, photocopied (poorly), hand-copied by another, revised by someone else.  The notes are un-numbered, faded and covered with coffee-stains. If we don't know the topic they were written for (or indeed what the writer assumed was common knowledge and didn't require recording) or the context for which they were written, how can we hope to extract reliable meaning from them?  What even was the original text, and what are later additions, revisions or mis-transmissions?

To make kata function as an effective tool for learning karate, we either need to rediscover their original context, or find a context within which they make coherent sense.  In other words, the functional understanding and interpretation of kata over a slavish adherence to an a-contextual form.

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