The main problem with documentation in my experience is that management just doesn't care.

I've been a tech writer in organizations that are layoff forward or micromanaging and people naturally begin to horde information to try to preserve their jobs (it didn't work.)

But because of that attitude I could also see that it was harder to get new hires up to speed because no one dared share knowledge, which wasted enormous amounts of money. Yet at other organizations that were more open to sharing I was able to reduce training times by 75% because I created a curriculum that worked way better.

I created a wiki for the support team and they were able to reduce call times by 40% because they had a place with the answers to the questions they were tired of answering. I reduced support calls by 60% by expanding the knowledge base to answer common questions, and built trust with customers because they worked.

By asking around what the best configuration was, and there was a lot of contradictory information, QA found ways to make the product perform 42x faster.

But none of that mattered in the end, because management can easily lay off technical writers to boost the stock price, and it takes years to feel the pain, by which time they've moved on already anyway.

There is also the hysteresis issue, they'll bring in a tech writer after a long time and it takes ages to become productive because of all the firefighting that needs to be done first, which is invisible.

WWII was where technical writing was recognized as valuable, but never got a movie, which would have helped provide respect.

Docs-as-code is great an all but that is for talking to other devs and you certainly don't want end users accessing the code. I love Apple for its accessibility but there are just so many features available that finding if the feature even exists can be the challenge, which needs better technical writing just to raise awareness.

Devs as writers are not just expensive, but they are trained to talk to computers asking them to write to another dev is hard enough, learning to write to all the kinds of end users that need the information is a whole other skill set. And it certainly doesn't help that 54% of Americans are functionally literate (reading <6th grade level).