The issue isn’t that the API documentation has disappeared, it’s that the learning experience for newcomers has degraded. The Observable-first direction has made it significantly harder for new users to grok D3 without buying into an entirely new runtime and mental model. Yes, the docs are technically still there, but they’re increasingly fragmented, and many examples now assume you’re using Observable or some variation of its reactive notebook model.
Bl.ocks.org wasn’t officially part of the D3 docs, but it played a critical role: it was the on-ramp. People learned by tweaking examples, not by reading method signatures in isolation. Saying people just want to “copy-paste” kind of misses the point, examples are how many developers build actual understanding. They’re not just blindly pasting code; they’re reverse-engineering patterns, figuring out how the pieces fit together.
We get it — you enjoy the library. But many users don’t appreciate the direction it’s taken. Such a bizarre defense. I guess we are not supposed to look at the examples when trying to grok a new library, especially a library for chart visualizations which is historically not known to be the easiest to work with.