Why on earth would I labor for free on someone’s vanity project, no matter what utility it provides otherwise? And why would a company pay a person who has already shown he or she does not value their own labor in that way?
You want good documentation from an (ostensibly hypothetical) piece of open source software that you use. But you will neither pay for nor contribute better documentation.
You see where the problem is, right? I'll give you a hint, it's not the developer...
No, it absolutely is the fault of the developer, both for poor practice of the craft and for contributing to a toxic, exploitative labor environment by giving away his work for free.
You don't have to use his project then.
Is someone release code because he liked to code but don't write any docs because that's boring, that's perfectly fine. No abuse there. The abuse is when you requests docs for free.
Someone working on open source to have fun is more likely to invest their time in more features instead of better documentation.
Here companies or users like you could step in and contribute better documentation or pay the original authors to improve the documentation.