The bad documentation I come across often shows every sign of having taken the advice from this article (and others like it) to heart.
The trouble is that the advice doesn't include ways to make sure your documentation actually covers everything it has to.
What this article says is that you should have « "API documentation" for every user-facing part of your project. »
That commonly leads to "reference" pages which are very little better than the autogenerated documentation the author dismisses. The main problems tend to be that behaviour that isn't controlled by a specific command or function or configuration setting doesn't get documented at all, and that commands with complex behaviour get described using terms that themselves need further definition which isn't provided anywhere.
My experience is that the main problem with online documentation is that it doesn't include links to separate tutorials, but has plenty of links to more documentation, leading you to wander from page to page without destination trying to find that one page that actually explains what you're trying to do or infer it from fragments of information scattered around the documentation.
For example, in Qt you have a view class, a model class, and a selection model class, and none of their pages tell you how to actually select something programmatically. You have to guess or ask ChatGPT these days.
The trouble is that the advice doesn't include ways to make sure your documentation actually covers everything it has to.
What this article says is that you should have « "API documentation" for every user-facing part of your project. »
That commonly leads to "reference" pages which are very little better than the autogenerated documentation the author dismisses. The main problems tend to be that behaviour that isn't controlled by a specific command or function or configuration setting doesn't get documented at all, and that commands with complex behaviour get described using terms that themselves need further definition which isn't provided anywhere.