The documentation of software packages, APIs, and driver kits was freely available online.
No, it hasn't. It was originally available exclusively to subscribers, and only on CD. MSDN started before the web existed.
Eventually, the documentation became free on the web.
You seem to be arguing against a negative value judgement which I did not make, or even suggest.
No it wasn't - the subscription service shipped CDs (and later DVDs) with technical articles, updated SDKs and the like. The actual documentation was always included with every Visual Studio version on the installation discs.
I remember quite vividly the "joy" of re-installing the latest version because the documentation format was incompatible between releases and you could either reinstall the new version from disc (which took ages) or convert the already installed one (which also took ages, but not quite as long as juggling 4 CDs - it had to "rebuild the index" or some nonsense like that IIRC).
So if you owned a physical copy of any Visual Studio edition, you also had the documentation and thus no need to subscribe to MSDN (apart from the technical columns, SDK updates and the magazine, which any reasonable boss would allow you to read during work hours).