onboarding devs won’t risk looking dumb to complain about the bad docs, the authors already have a mental model, and writing them out fully helped others at expense of job security.

When doling bad docs to a stupid robot, you only have yourself to blame for the bad docs. So I think it’s #2 + #3. The big change is replacability going from bad to desirable (replace yourself with agents before you are replaced with a cheaper seat)