It wasn’t the VB part of VBA that wasn’t well documented, but rather the “for A” part that was spotty. The application automation model wasn’t as thoroughly documented as most of Microsoft’s stuff. This was well after the Internet was seriously prevalent.

Things like destroying [iff present] and recreating Excel charts from scratch, including generating all the series labels, shapes, etc., updating elements in a word doc from an excel sheet, generating on-slide progress indicators in PowerPoint.

That’s true. But the ability to record macros, as you mentioned, and the object browser alleviate the problem at least in part.