For those programs that have betrayed shipping man pages, instead say relying only on a --help system, do you happen to know if the fish shell has an analogue to Zsh `_gnu_generic` and Bash `complete -F _longopt`? If not, do you have any insight into why not/what it would take to make that happen?
The OP mentions them in the last part of their comment, there is `complete …` commands for registering completions
At least for a subset of Python CLI programs, I wrote this: https://github.com/AdrianVollmer/pycompgen
Still in an early stage, but it should work.