> Another difference is that documentation is essentially annotated today. If the documentation is confusing or misleading, it's usually clarified in a stack overflow or some other forum. Before Google, if documentation was confusing, you were stuck guessing or hacking. That was very time consuming.

I would say that one of the reasons why php (the language) took off in the early 2000s was because of its excellent docs pages: each doc page for a specific function had a comment section where you could find the actual examples of said function being used, by actual people. Pretty similar to what one can now find on SO.