your 2nd para is gold. I believe this explains the phenomenon where when you join a new company or parachute into a new codebase for the first time, its often painful ramping up. because so much tribal knowledge is undocumented. or docs not kept updated and wrong. or each dev has their own workflow that works for them privately but nobody's maintaining a common one a newbie can use to get started. some shops/projects better about it than others, obviously.