It allows you to easily search everything! At my last company, someone pointed out to me that I could find almost anything I wanted to know about existing systems in our confluence.
It is excellent for collaborative editing.
It is excellent for writing and formatting documentation that must be shared.
It has a wide variety macros and plugins that let you effortlessly embed charts and diagrams. Admittedly, some macros (ie gliffy) are vastly superior to others (lucidchart).
You can write good documentation with minimal effort. But it also provides a comprehensive set of tools to format the crap out of your documents if you want to.
At this point, I'm really struggling to figure out what someone actually wants out of a "perfect" product. A lot of the things the author complains about would require draconian solutions from a systems standpoint that would just set off another round of complaints that the system is to restrictive.
The first one is correct. Confluence will happily search PDFs uploaded to pages. Search in general is... well it's not good. Confluence very much requires that you know exactly what you're searching for and roughly where it is. Unless it's a PDF. In that case it will be the top result for 8 out of 10 searches.
That being said I still think Confluence is one of the best documentation platforms available. It's a little sad that Atlassian is discontinuing the server version (datacenter still exists). Many of their customers simply cannot legally use their hosted option. I know we have at least two customers who are absolutely screwed when they reach EOL on their on-prem installation, because they cannot afford datacenter licenses.
Oddly, to your first point, I've had exactly the opposite experience. Came from a company that used sharepoint for almost everything, that I referred to as /dev/null - if you didn't know EXACTLY what you were looking for, search was useless after you uploaded or created something. It was not uncommon for the document with matching search terms in the title, to show up on page 3 of the results.
Moved to a company that used Confluence for almost everything (there was already a fair bit of content), and search was an absolute dream. Even with terrible search terms, the page (or document) you were looking for was invariably in the first 3 results.
Confluence and JIRA both depend on how your company configures them.
They can both be set up to be incredibly useful, or completely useless.
Typically, the more configuration was decided by someone who doesn't do technical work, the more they slide towards the latter. In most companies, they're configured exclusively by people who don't do technical work (e.g. HR).
It's web based so no installation hassle.
It allows the raw storage of documentation.
It allows you to search uploaded documentation.
It allows you to easily search everything! At my last company, someone pointed out to me that I could find almost anything I wanted to know about existing systems in our confluence.
It is excellent for collaborative editing.
It is excellent for writing and formatting documentation that must be shared.
It has a wide variety macros and plugins that let you effortlessly embed charts and diagrams. Admittedly, some macros (ie gliffy) are vastly superior to others (lucidchart).
You can write good documentation with minimal effort. But it also provides a comprehensive set of tools to format the crap out of your documents if you want to.
At this point, I'm really struggling to figure out what someone actually wants out of a "perfect" product. A lot of the things the author complains about would require draconian solutions from a systems standpoint that would just set off another round of complaints that the system is to restrictive.