You'll find 100s or 1000s of article espousing the opposite. That you can't know what you want until you try building it. You can't see all of the issues and all of the problems and how your design really doesn't work until you actually try to build it.

Imagine a chef trying to come up with a new dish. I suspect they don't write it down first. They mix things in and then see what to add to make it better. Sometimes they fail but don't think they'd get there by making cards. Cards are not the flavor and docs are not the actual product.

Maybe it fits certain products more than others or maybe like everything it just depends, some projects succeed using the waterfall style, others need to improvise.

Generally I think I prefer the iterate and edit style to the plan everything before you start style. But I also don't like wasting time so I'd prefer to spend as little time as possible going down paths that will be discarded. But often I think you can't know it's the wrong path until you get there.