UML works.
One can lead a horse to water... just like one can stand up ALL of the top, fully-functional UML tools for a software team at what used to be a performant defense contractor, and have literally ZERO people use it.
Same with system engineers and commitment. Requirements work. Model driven time wasting doesn't.
Those days were a decade ago, and everyone with a license to software like Enterprise Architect did that already with a click of a button.
Even before that this was at the reach of everyone with FLOSS tools like Umbrella.
What exactly was your point?
> Fast forward to 2023 and we're generating UML diagrams from C++ code because it's easier. I love this.
You missed the whole point of this tool. This tool is ideal for those of us who work on legacy projects and want a high level view of the project structure to make it easier to get a feel of the project.
Which is anyone more than few months into any project developed by multiple people.
I continue to be amazed at how our entire field claims to consider code readability paramount, and yet invests approximately zero effort into making codebases legible.
There may be a few hundred good C++ programmers around but nobody can grok UML, if somebody says they can: they're a liar.
I don't know what UML you've seen, but the one I typically see only expresses high level details and is created to convey the important details, and therefore is trivially simple to understand.