I would ask not so much whether it has paid off or whether there was improvement, but whether it is paying off.
We're not done yet, we have really only just got started - it's a long-term project of transformation, that starts with practice and processes and people and will eventually show up in the documentation that's produced.
You can see evidence of it already in some of our documentation, it's the work of those engineering teams that have been spearheading the efforts, but it's all work in progress and we have a long way to go. (It's also all incremental work, so in general, there won't be dramatic big bangs to show.)
What you can't see from the outside are things like mindset, priorities and understanding of documentation - those are the things that will make for long-term success.
All the same, you remind me that it's probably a good idea to follow up that article with one pointing to some visible results.
Specifically I'm about to try using the apt section, and I'm not exactly sure how to translate the curtin docs to the autoinstall format... Especially when it comes to adding keys. And a comment about needing to use exact bytes for normal partitions in the storage section would have saved me a few hours the other day... :)
Oh, and thanks for linking to that Diátaxis framework. I might have use for that at work.
[0] https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/install/autoinstall-reference