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"Mine is probably not the only codebase filled full of edge cases which is only fully described by the codebase and takes months or years for new folks to wrap their heads around enough to navigate confidently" a pretty key realization about the world.
Codebase could be metaphorical or very literal here.
I think from this pretty quickly follows a forward derivation of Michael Creighton's take on journalists, which is that they substantially misreport things pervasively and that we only notice when they're reporting on our own expertise.
There are interesting models and correct models one can have of a codebase after 2 weeks of study by asking people questions about it, but there are probably no models which are interesting, correct, and complete all at the same time which can be produced in that timeframe.
And the vast majority of the newspaper structurally has to be produced by reporters working on that timeframe or less, so the vast majority of the newspaper structurally is interesting, correct, complete: pick 0 to 2 and you may get them.
