[tracker1]

I'm not sure it's really cynical at all, in my experience, even with a LOT of wiki documentation, it is almost always severely out of date and many people don't know what is where... after a while, there's new, new, new versions of docs because people didn't want to refactor existing docs someone else created. And, in the end, almost nobody reads it and just ask other, more senior people within the team/org.

This is, of course, without explicit management directives to update documentation as a task/chore. Much like in many (most?) orgs, churning through technical debt is rarely a priority.

That said, no place is perfect and it takes only a handful of people to improve a culture, but without at least management support and/or fostering such a culture, it doesn't tend to happen.