Long story short, you have to download the current manual and place it inside the app’s Resources folder. Below is a video covering the process.
This should not be necessary; the version of the manual distributed with each release of Scrivener should be the the appropriate one for that release. Updating a manual to a version of Scrivener that you haven’t updated to may discuss features that have changed/aren’t present in the installed software.
If the manual distributed with Scrivener is out of date, that’s a bug with their install bundle, and Lit & Lat should be informed of the issue so they can correct the problem.
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I agree that the manual that’s called up from the Help menu should be the most up to date, but I don’t know how easy that is to maintain. If the manual is only updated to accompany new point releases/updates, that would work perfectly once the update is installed. But maybe @AmberV updates the manual in between software updates - I don’t know the answer to that.
All speculation on my part, I really don’t know enough about the technicalities. All I can tell you is that I’m running Scrivener 3.2.3, and the Help menu gives me version 3.2.0 of the manual, which is out of date.
It was necessary yesterday, for me and another user.
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But maybe @AmberV updates the manual in between software updates - I don’t know the answer to that.
Yes, I tend to upload monthly-ish updates to the documentation, fixing inaccuracies, rewriting confusing areas, fixing typos, etc. Typically they are nothing crucial to stay on top of though, unless you are writing about Scrivener and want to make sure your references to manual section numbers are accurate.
I understand in this case there is much more of an impetus to update the software copy though! Quite a lot has been changed and revised since 2020.
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Thanks Ioa, good to know. I guess then I have a question: When I instal a Scrivener update, is the Help menu supposed to update to the latest version of the manual? If so, then I assume that my update went awry somehow.
If that’s not supposed to happen, can I suggest that it should going forward? With the caveat that I don’t know how trivial or hard that would be to implement 
I completely understand that the incremental updates to the manual are unlikely to make a major difference to the kind of information I’d be looking for, but it’s nice to be up to date. Thanks!
Like any other resource in the software—compile settings, scriptwriting modes and other thing that might see revision from one release to the next—the PDF is as noted, part of the .app itself and installs along with everything else in an update. The Help menu, that you refer to, is just a command that fires off a request to open a file.
The manual here was out of date because minor updates did not update it.
Thanks @AmberV, I understood that part. The point I was making (as is @drmajorbob) is that my Help menu command is pointing to an out of date file. So either the fault is/was with the installer of Scrivener 3.2.3 (as suggested by @Rdale), or my instal of the program was borked in this one detail.
Yes, you can verify this very simply by downloading the 3.2.3 DMG, dropping the Scrivener.app folder somewhere inconsequential, like the Downloads folder, and opening the PDF of the user manual from within it. You should find it is equally out of date, which would imply the updater is out of date as well.
What may be a point of confusion, and why I wasn’t even thinking of how this could be confusing, is that Mac update frameworks are pretty “dumb” for the year 2022. If you change one single word in a small metadata file and release it as an update, everyone still has to download all 140mb or whatever—it’s just the full installer basically.