I think the appeal of /cow/, at least from my experience having used /cwc/ back in the day (like before 8chan, fuck 8chan), is that it's kind of a rapid stream of shitposting you can get high off of, blending in with the crowd as one entity bent on just hating the guts of one specific idiot. It really is entirely impenetrable if you haven't been following the threads before whatever the current thread for a specific cow was. I remember the Rika threads on /cwc/ and I really would not have known what the fuck was going on if I didn't follow them from the start, and he had like, 13 threads or something because robbie would not stop responding.
It sincerely is a circlejerk. That's just how image boards work in general, you either get in early or you walk into the middle of a conversation that's wholly jargon and stopped being english a while ago. There's little to no history to see where their slang started from. In fact I might even vaguely recall people asking "why are people posting robbie rotten so much" in the Rika threads. There are so many easy ways to mitigate this issue, but no image board ever attempts it. The simplest, manual way would be to link to some resource people can read from in an OP, but that's certainly not something implemented in the software level. It doesn't have to be a full-fledged PHPBB or XenForo forum, but, shit, just add something, anything. Otherwise you may as well just be DM'ing a bunch of friends in discord. We don't have anything even remotely like those issues, we have threads, we have opening posts, we have a wiki, we can keep track of things for newcomers to consume. We don't yell at people for not having encyclopedic knowledge of any given cow, but we sure have much more of a right to do so than a place where information is permanently lost a week after it's posted.
Image boards are just not cut out for this medium. A cow keeps existing long after a thread dies. Image boards are for asking for advice or talking about this week's episode of something, little short-term things like that. /cow/ is trying to put a square block into a round hole.