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This is correct. The buff texts are just little hardcoded strings to give a quick idea of what a buff or debuff is doing. They're not intended to be comprehensive, and trying to make them be so would be a large amount of work for little gain because most people never read them, and that information is already available to players in easier-to-read forms in more appropriate places. That information is part of the skill, which is a separate thing from the buff, and only really connected on the server (buffs are entirely server-driven). Having buffs not only able to insert values into their texts, but do so with values that aren't even part of the buff, but need to be accessed from individual skills would be an extra system that needs to be implemented, takes effort to maintain, and would require buffs serialising more values to the client in a lot of cases - which is bad because buff serialisation is already something we have to keep working to reduce for performance.
The skill popup/character screen is where full information is given, and has access to the stats of the skill, so can give the exact duration. There's simply not enough need to duplicate that information in the tiny popup when you hover a buff icon to justify the work of getting that information there from the skill and complicating the display.
Technically, that part should arguably not even be on the buff text at all, because that isn't part of the effect of the buff (which matters mechanically - that duration is not scaled by buff effect modifiers). Buffs only say what they do, so people can understand what is and is not the effect of the buff (and thus what can be modified by various stats that change how much buffs affect you). That duration is a stat in the skill that happened to create that buff, but is unrelated to the data of the buff itself. In this case, since we can (hopefully) guaruntee that no-one has this buff other than by having the skill active, we opted to provide more information here - while being careful not to imply this was a numerical effect of the buff, for mechanical clarity.
There's simply not enough need to duplicate that information in the tiny popup when you hover a buff icon to justify the work of getting that information
What about stuff like shrine effects where the information is not available anywhere in-game because the buff descriptions are so useless? Surely you can't seriously believe that third-party Wikipedia sites are the
more appropriate places
for basic game information.
Shrines are intentionally mysterious - they aren't supposed to be things the player knows exact details of.
for mechanical clarity.
Guess that's a bit of a losing battle... I doubt the average player knows details like buff duration vs skill duration vs flask duration - that's not explained anywhere in game, is it?
I'm not sure what part of that would need an explicit in-game explaination. Those things, at least, work really intuitively for the most part - in the case of skills, and buffs granted by skills, pretty much all of those list a duration, outside of cases where the base duration is variable based on some non-predictable element, and those still explicitly use the term "duration" to make it clear those modifiers apply.
Modifiers referring to "skill effect" modify values which are a) on skills, and b) called "duration". In addition, in almost all cases you can see a total duration on the relevant skill popup, and observe whether it changes.
Modifiers to buff duration come in two kinds - the one that applies to the character as a whole explicitly says in modifies "Duration of Buffs and Debuffs you create with Skills". This in almost all cases applies to things created by skills which are shown on the relevant skill popup as "buff duration" or "debuff duration". There are also cases which explicitly apply to, or are present as part of, a specific skill, in which case they function the same way but limited to that skill, and thus don't need to specify the "you create from Skills" part.
In general, I would like to know how stuff affects me yeah of course - that's no matter if we are talking about how much damage my main skill does (imagine if Arc simply read 'deals lightning damage') or how a gloom shrine works. Are some things more important than others? Sure. Is it dumb to intentionally leave out relevant information? Yep.
I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting that, but for PoE we've always had what I thought was a pretty clear division of trying to give all relevant details where possible for aspects of your character, and not doing that for other objects acting on the character - the shrine is a separate entity that applies it's own effect to you, just like a monster using a skill, and we don't show all the stat values the shrine uses in-game for the same reason we don't show those for monsters.
Sure, except that in the case of Primal Aegis, the buff text is in a way more verbose than the source of the buff in the Elementalist passive. Not only does the passive not tell you the duration of the no-damage buffer either, but it doesn't even specify that it can only block elemental damage from hits. Yes, it may seem intuitive that an Elementalist skill would only block elemental hits, but the passive description explicitly reads "Block damage from hits." So someone Jousis might make a build and not get the full information on how the skill works until he gets to read the buff text, which you're arguing is too verbose already.
The passive explicitly gives you a skill - like all skills, the detailed information for this skill can be seen in the character panel, including duration, and the in-depth description of the skill's mechanics.
Your point about the skill-specific modifier the node adds is a good one, though. This happened as a side effect of how the Aegises work - they have a stat to determine how much damage they can take, and a separate stat to determine which types of damage they can take - this only affects the former, so uses a description which matches that. But in this context it could be changed to be more clear for players who don't look up the character panel for the skill's fuill description. I've adjusted that for 3.14.