> I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools.

Probably negligible. It's not a problem you can solve by pouring more money in. Evidence: configuration file format. I've never seen programmers who enjoy writing YAML. And pure JSON (without comments) is simply not a format should be written by humans. But as far as I know even in the richest companies these formats are still common. And the bad thing they were supposed to replace, XML config, was popularized by rich companies too...!

I love YAML, so there is at least one weirdo out there on the internet who is bitter that TOML and JSON won

JSON is not designed as a configuration file format.