In the same way a Lada is an automobile.

Perhaps it's improved, but a while ago I tried to program Base and found the documentation around it's functions/methods/properties to be scant and/or terribly out-of-date, and pretty much useless.

Ouch!

:-)

Yeah, it's the unloved step-child of the LibreOffice suite, we fix stuff sometimes, but there is no commercial user of it to fund development

In theory, but not in practice. Yes, it's a somewhat visual database. But it doesn't have anywhere near the power or ease of use that Access did 20 years ago and its integration with the rest of LO isn't even close to what Access does in MS Office. If that weren't bad enough, the underlying database it uses is effectively an island in the larger open source world.

In the Windows world, just about everything can interact with Access. Just about nothing can with Base.