([s]he praised documenting concepts, not the documentation as a whole)

Exactly. I wish I could help with docs for Webpack, but personally I'm willing to trade extensive documentation for a friendly community. These aren't mutually exclusive of course, but I've seen my share of OSS projects with a bad attitude towards beginners and people who are just missing some detail for the whole thing to click.

Likewise, my point re: boilerplates would be moot if most boilerplates had good docs (even if just a detailed README).