My parents work for a company using an old system using numeric IDs for menus and screens. It's currently a web app, but it seems to share a good deal of code (and a great deal of philosophy) with the previous, older version, a TUI apparently built in Pascal.
I can confirm that those numeric IDs help A LOT in troubleshooting and documentation. And not only that: those IDs are frequently and naturally used by the users themselves when communicating between them. Needless to say, they also use the IDs to navigate the system, only touching the menus when they have to use some infrequent function.
I always mention this "case study" to UX folks who insist to dumb users down with childish interfaces.
I can confirm that those numeric IDs help A LOT in troubleshooting and documentation. And not only that: those IDs are frequently and naturally used by the users themselves when communicating between them. Needless to say, they also use the IDs to navigate the system, only touching the menus when they have to use some infrequent function.
I always mention this "case study" to UX folks who insist to dumb users down with childish interfaces.