[2rsf]

actually having a newcomer install everything and fix the documentation while doing it is even a better option, cloning has some of the dependencies but other might have been installed by the developer for example global packages for NPM or Python, setting of system wide environment variables etc.

[nullsense]

This happened at my org... 8 separate times. It was always slightly wrong each time, even after it was fixed. I think it's better now, but I never considered doing it myself as an established team member.

Though I once inherited a large enterprise code base that I had to study and build a dev environment for pretty much all by myself. I had maybe 2 calls with the original team and a couple of emails but was mostly by myself just figuring it out. It was a pretty incredible experience and taught me a tonne about how the system worked and was put together. This helped immensely when we spun up a team to work on it. So, I get where this article is coming from due to that experience, but didn't think to do this kind of stuff on purpose.

[OJFord]

Unless you're hiring like crazy, it's never going to be and stay perfect, but hopefully with fixing whatever issues each time you stay relatively on top of it, and it's never too much work.