[killtimeatwork]

Many/most teams don't have heroes at all, they only have noobs :) I.e. most people stay on a team for a year or three and change jobs afterwards - there's no chance of accumulating knowledge. Nobody is sure how things work and why they are the way they are.

I believe many managers are fine with this, because the team is producing something (i.e. "velocity" is higher than zero), but are oblivious to the fact that team could be way more productive if the knowledge was actually retained in people's heads and not just lousy attempts at documentation.

[schnitzelstoat]

I don't know if they are oblivious to it - but it might not be possible to pay people enough to get them to stay due to pay bands set by HR etc.

OP mentions that he is in Germany - there it might be more possible as SWE doesn't pay as well as it does in the USA and there are fewer companies so it might be feasible to pay a lot more than the competition, whereas in the USA that's unlikely to be viable outside of companies like Netflix etc.