pydoc help:

  pydoc -w <name> ...
    Write out the HTML documentation for a module to a file in the current
    directory. […]

So there is no support for not using the current directory, probably on purpose in order to use the current-dir-in-sys.path trick, so I’m not sure if this should be addressed.

(These days I would be more worried about src directories, which I’ve just tested are not handled well by pydoc, but that would be a different ticket.)