Yup, I’ve always referred to UML as ‘a formal standard for back-of-the-envelope sketches’. It demands too much precision and rigor to be used during the early

Yup, I’ve always referred to UML as ‘a formal standard for back-of-the-envelope sketches’. It demands too much precision and rigor to be used during the early parts of a project when you want to just get people on the same page about roughly how things should be structured without baking in assumptions too early. Then in the later part of a project when you’re talking about modifying an existing system, reexpressing the existing semantics accurately in UML first demands unnecessary pedantry. When you draw a diagram to communicate something about a system, being able to choose which things are important to you right now and which things aren’t is a feature of informal diagramming, not a bug.