I generally find the aversion to documentation comes from one of three places:
* A belief that sufficient documentation means their job is at risk (which, to be fair, is 100% correct in this Capitalist hellscape - ask me how I know first-hand)
* It’s irrelevant since the code will change again in a short amount of time
* A fierce protection over one’s output, sometimes manifesting as a belief that nobody but you could ever understand what you created
Sure, sometimes there’s wholly incompetent developers who can’t even tell you their own dependencies, but I’d like to believe they’re still the exception rather than the rule. As for the value proposition, collaborators and cooperators understand the immense value of good, thorough documentation; those who don’t see the value, at least in my experience, are often adversarial instead of cooperative.
This perceived value would be much higher if the docs were to tangibly become part of a productive tool chain