Documentation often turns into wasted effort. Either because it is not very good or because it is never read. Another thing that can easily happen is that the documentation gets scattered in various places and it is difficult to know whether there useful information pertaining to the problem at hand and if so where it would be.

Good documentation needs a judgement about what is important to tell people and how to best present that information. This is not an easy thing to do and is never going to happen without some dedication. Certainly if the developer actually does not want to write anything but is told to 'just write some comments' it is not going to lead to anything helpful.

So, either management has to insist on documentation and actually check that what is written is helpful and is in some sort of searchable structure or it is just a waste of everybody's time.