[DyslexicAtheist]

what you mention are real pain points, though from my experience they actually were a lot simpler than locking info away in some external tool. there is very little additional cognitive cost with adr's and from what I've experienced they add other value too such as a record of why things were done which saves a lot of time when you're ramping up and onboarding new team members who have a tendency to discuss why things are done in a specific way and not another. when used correctly they're not just another thing to take care of but an actual time saver (have personally avoided many meetings by simply pointing new people to them - and they have the benefit of structuring and capturing the architecture discussions in a central place right next to your code ... (if the git log history isn't enough for us we use gitlab comments on changes the same way we would use it on code). it's brilliant because it's so simple imo.