This isn't an apple thing. Its industry wide. Much of the good documentation that exists is stuff that was written 20+ years ago by actual technical writers and

This isn't an apple thing. Its industry wide. Much of the good documentation that exists is stuff that was written 20+ years ago by actual technical writers and is still being maintained. AKA the windows API/etc documentation, linux man pages, etc. The vast majority of modern documentation is worthless autogenerated garbage when it exists. It lacks good examples, meaningful overviews and functional diagrams. In many cases its woefully out of date because someone rejiggered an API and didn't bother to even update the inline documentation. One of the better examples of recent documentation is the core rust docs/books. Even then because the rapid release cycles no one publishes an updated "Learn Rust" book for every release, complete with boxes explaining what has changed since the last release. And god help you if you dig to far into the library ecosystem. I think this is caused by one single problem. Documentation isn't sexy and no one is paying technical writers to do the grunt work anymore. Opensource is a large part of this problem, but the commercial guys have discovered they can save a few hundred thousand a year by simply not having a documentation team, and it doesn't appear to affect them much. A couple youtube tutorials and they are done. You can see this in the evolution of software, etc. In the 1970's you got large paper manuals which covered every technical aspect of the machine/software. The users were expected to use their brains. Then in the 1980's it all transitioned to "user documentation" which was more focused on manuals that explain how to use the product, by removing the how it works part. Then in the 1990's it started moving to digital copies on disk, and the product came with a 3-4 page manual explaining how to bootstrap enough to read the rest of the docs. In the 2000's it all moved online and became more "marketing" than users guides. In the 2010's they stopped even that. Now you get a phone/software/computer your lucky to even get a piece of paper that tells you how to turn it on, charge it, or install it. Even ms doesn't publish a complete guide to all the magic swipes and keystrokes that are supported by their new shell.