You are right. We are seeing a transition from the user as a customer to the user as a resource. It's almost like a cartel of shitty treatment.

I don't work for the public transit company; I introduce immigrants to Berlin's public transit. To answer to the broader question, good documentation is one of the many little things that affect how you feel about a company. The BVG clearly cares about that, because their marketing department is famously competent. Good documentation also means that fewer people will queue at their service centre and waste an employee's time. Documentation is the cheaper form of customer service.

Besides, how people feels about the public transit company does matter, because their funding is partly a political question. No one will come to defend a much-hated, customer-hostile service.

> You mention you've done work for public transit - well, if public transit documentation suddenly starts being terrible, will it lead to an immediate, noticeable drop in revenue? Doubt it. Firing the technical writer however has an immediate and quantifiable effect on the budget.

Exactly. If the AI-made documentation is only 50% of the quality but can be produced for 10% of the price, well, we all know what the "smart" business move is.

Also consider that while the OP looks like a skilled, experienced individual, all too often the documentation is being written by someone with that context, but rather someone unskilled, and with read empathy. Quality is quite often very poor, to the point where as shitty as genai can be, it is still an improvement. Bad UX and writing outnumbers the good. The successes of big companies and the most well known government services are the exception.

"well, if public transit documentation suddenly starts being terrible, will it lead to an immediate, noticeable drop in revenue? Doubt it."

First, I understand what you're saying and generally agree with it, in the sense that that is how the organization will "experience" it.

However, the answer to "will it lead to a noticeable drop in revenue" is actually yes. The problem is that it won't lead to a traceable drop in revenue. You may see the numbers go down. But the numbers don't come with labels why. You may go out and ask users why they are using your service less, but people are generally very terrible at explaining why they do anything, and few of them will be able to tell you "your documentation is just terrible and everything confuses me". They'll tell you a variety of cognitively available stories, like the place is dirty or crowded or loud or the vending machines are always broken, but they're terrible at identifying the real root causes.

This sort of thing is why not only is everything enshittifying, but even as the entire world enshittifies, everybody's metrics are going up up up. It takes leadership willing to go against the numbers a bit to say, yes, we will be better off in the long term if we provide quality documentation, yes, we will be better off in the long term if we use screws that don't rust after six months, yes, we will be better off in the long term if we don't take the cheapest bidder every single time for every single thing in our product but put a bit of extra money in the right place. Otherwise you just get enshittification-by-numbers until you eventually go under and get outcompeted and can't figure out why because all your numbers just kept going up.

>it's not like people have any options.

That’s one way to frame it. An other one is, sometime people are stuck in a situation where all options that come to their mind have repulsive consequences.

As always some consequences are deemed more immediate, and other will seem remoter. And often the incentives can be quite at odd between expectations in the short/long terms.

>this sucks and I'm gonna build a better one in a weekend

Hey, this is me looking at the world this morning. Bear with me, the bright new harmonious world should be there on Monday. ;)