Given enough experiences of documentation diverging from reality - the system does not behave how the docs claimed it should - people lose faith in the document

Given enough experiences of documentation diverging from reality - the system does not behave how the docs claimed it should - people lose faith in the documentation. That may explain the sentiment that the code is the documentation. There may be some html or pdf with "documentation" in the name, but if it's inaccurate, you're going to end up looking at the code anyway. If that's your experience it makes writing documentation hard to justify. It's a poor approximation to reality which becomes steadily less true over time. So really what's the point. We need something closer to live documentation which runs the examples against the codebase and fails CI when they stop working to have a chance. Some projects do that. Deriving docs from comments helps a little but comments are often wrong too.