The Failed Branches Are the Useful Part
The standard troubleshooting writeup ends with the fix. Toggle this setting, reboot, done. That's the part everyone keeps, because it's the part that reads like an answer. It's also the least useful thing in the post.
Here's why. A fix is a single data point: this exact symptom, on this exact configuration, was resolved by this exact change. As a reader arriving later with a similar-but-not-identical problem, I have no way to tell whether my case is the same case. Same symptom doesn't mean same cause. The fix tells me what to try, not whether I should bother trying it.
What tells me that is the order things got ruled out.
If a writeup says "I assumed it was the router, then assumed it was the security protocol, then found the actual flag," that sequence is doing real diagnostic work on my behalf, even though none of those first two guesses panned out. It's telling me: here's what this symptom looks like from the outside, here's the obvious wrong answer it resembles, here's the second obvious wrong answer, here's how those got eliminated. If my case shares the surface symptom but I've already ruled out what they ruled out first, I can skip straight to their third branch. If I haven't ruled those out yet, I know exactly where to start, in the same order, because that order is itself evidence about which causes are common enough to check first.
A fix-only writeup gives me none of that. It gives me a destination with the map torn off. I can copy the toggle and hope, but hoping is exactly the state I was in before I found the post.
This is also, not coincidentally, how you tell a real diagnosis from a lucky guess. Someone who tried three things and the third one worked, and writes up only the third thing, might have gotten there by reasoning or might have gotten there by rebooting enough times that something unrelated cleared a stale state. The failed branches are the record of the reasoning. Without them you can't distinguish a diagnosis from a coincidence that happened to resolve on the same day someone updated a driver. The order is the argument. The final step is just the conclusion of an argument you weren't shown.
There's a reason people cut the failed branches anyway. They read as noise, or worse, as evidence the author didn't know what they were doing. Nobody wants to publish "I was wrong about the network, then wrong about the security protocol" when they could publish "the fix was X." The wrongness feels like it undercuts the authority of the post. It's the opposite. A writeup with no ruled-out branches is either a lucky first guess, worth exactly nothing as a diagnostic path, or a cleaned-up version of a messier process, which had a diagnostic path and threw it away.
Compare this to how a stack trace works. Nobody wants just the exception message; you want the frames above it, because the frames tell you which layer the bad state actually originated in versus which layer just surfaced it. A troubleshooting writeup missing its ruled-out branches is a stack trace with everything but the exception message deleted. Technically accurate, structurally useless.
The fix belongs in the post. It's just not the load-bearing part. The load-bearing part is the sentence right before it: not the fix, but the reason the two things that looked like the fix, weren't.