It’s in the official installation instructions… not mysteriously hidden somewhere.
There is a difference between “coding it” as you say, and sysadmin work.
“coding it” means you’re restricted to what what the web server user is allowed to do. And in shared hostings, that is not a lot. Commands trying to set ownerships or permissions simply fail. Or the software might not even be able to reach that point because it gets stopped by permissions problems before it can even check permissions.
I agree with you that this is not well done, it sucks, and for some crazy reason nobody takes this seriously, and that this craps up adoption of this software. God knows I’ve tried to raise awareness, write docs, answer forum posts, make PR’s, but it’s just a swamp.
My only gripe is that people shouldn’t underestimate the complexity of this. There will be no silver bullet that makes SuiteCRM a breeze to install by non-technical people in all kinds of environments. There can only be better documentation, better logging, better diagnostics, better ways to fail (with instructions on how to fix, adapted to the specificity of the current system).