New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Are System Design documents out of fashion?

Ask HN: Are System Design documents out of fashion?
2 by throeawayDocs | 2 comments on Hacker News.
I’ve been hopping around a number of large non-FAANG enterprises for the past few years. In each, I keep observing a pattern - people seem uninterested in writing System Design / Architecture documentation. I struggle to grok a system if I can’t read about the context. What are the goals/antigoals? What constraints was the system built under? What big architectural choices were evaluated? (e.g Serverless vs Containers) Digging deeper I also see a lack of consideration for non-functional attributes like Performance, Capacity and High Availability. Cloud paradigms can help to an extent with auto-scaling etc., but I feel there should still be a model for the expected Perf/Capacity, given the selected SW+HW stack. In the case of High Availability, I continully see teams running critical Prod services without clearly documenting the expected behaviour if an Instance, AZ/Datacentre, Region or an external dependency goes down. All of these observations have been in highly regulated industries with significant tech budgets. So HN: Do you teams document these architectural designs? Have I perhaps lost touch with modern practices? How do you grow teams (or defend the design from Mgmt / Auditors) if this information is held in peoples heads? Appreciate your input and apologies as English is my second language.