[DavidPiper]

While I think there's some truth to yours and some of the sibling comments here, I think a lot of the discourse around documentation is actually just motivated reasoning.

The trope that software projects are poorly documented is so pervasive as to be saying nothing at this point. Despite extremely useful and celebrated documentation projects (MDN and Python off the top of my head) that dramatically accelerate other peoples' learning and productivity.

But when the topic is raised, the response is always "But we don't have time for documentation".

And when that time is given it becomes "It will be useless or out of date soon anyway, just go read the code" (As if there is nothing between non-practical high-level docs and per-line code comments.)

And when forced it becomes "Fine, but it won't be any good" or "Other people won't read/benefit from it anyway".

And when it's done, often as little effort as possible is put into it.

All of which smell to me like cover stories for: "I just don't want to do it."

[ijustlovemath]

In the case of Python, I do think the approachability of the documentation slipped after they migrated to the 3.x site, and I think this is somewhat reflected in the search engine rankings.