The difference today is the docs are being read. In the before times, unless you were building a foundational library, docs would get updated when a presentation was needed to announce a great success, or maybe not even then. Nowadays if you want coding agents to be efficient, doc quality is paramount.

IOW there’s very clear ROI on docs today, it wasn’t so earlier.

I guess also the opposite is true, if a developer wants job security, not writing docs (and writing obfuscated code) is still the way to go :-p