Our companies evaluators picked up Cortex for a service registry offering because it did more for them faster, but they may switch over to backstage in time if they find the integration straightforward enough
How about just using github? or if you want more how about building a a node/vue app? Or for docs scrounge up any static doc creation system and thereyago. most have some really editing features and BEHOLD markdown with colors!
I'm being a little silly there but my issue isn't that this isn't valuable software in the right situation. My issues is that its presented as some sort of magic bullet for a specific documentation issue when the problems described are generally not software related or software solved.
Most of what is presented in the article isn't about BS doing what this person attempted to do for 2 years. Its about switching paradigms and letting folks document in their repos instead of in a centralized system. One could just as easily look over the repos in a github org and go to those files in a repo. Both solutions require standardizing where things are documented..... so does a centralized system.
The big callout should be that when trying to centralize docs that align to apps they become disconnected from the apps themselves and thus its a pita to get everyone to do everything in 2 places. I'd be very curious if they completely turned off BS if there would be any loss... if not why bother with the overhead. Templating and other things are well handled by MS Clis, cookie-cutter or other more portable concepts and who needs yet another team and resource mgmt system. Splunk and other off the shelf systems can easily provide more comprehensive and robust stats and generally speaking there is a more enterprise level solution for just about everything it does.
Yes BS is a swiss army knife but when was the last time you saw a chef use one of those in the kitchen?
Oldschool solution that I have used many times is to setup an oldschool internal Wiki (can be hosted on anything). This gets used as an internal resource for everything (requires buy in from the right people obviously) and is actually quite useful. Very easy to get started and very easy for people to start creating entries.