Or, maybe I'm reading bad practices in my industry to everywhere else.

It is totally possible that the line workers have no idea what the documentation on the tooling says.

As yes, plenty of fixes for things are not written down anywhere.

Have others come in and follow the directions.

Every time i am dealing in new hires, i realise how much we just take for granted

He asked how long the job would take, and we answered about a week for all the common stuff. And his answer was, "That is a week you will not be making the company any money.".

We tried to explain the long term savings, but he was not interested.

Many scientific studies cannot be replicated either due to errors or ambiguous steps.

You only have what you test. If you want working documentation, you have to do a blind test. That can be pretty dang expensive, and most people don't think that way. Running production is heavily motivated to just keep running, and not worry too much about all of the potential problems - there are just too many potential problems.

https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Lostech

The technician refused to document the procedure because he was afraid of becoming replaceable. He was afraid of becoming replaceable because he was afraid of losing his job. He was afraid of losing his job because he would lose his sole source of income.

Let's just give people free money already.

Management gets exactly the behaviours from employees that it rewards and incentivises.