What you say does happen, and it's an interesting perspective (I guess I had always seen the "half-baked history" sections as something annoying but inevitable)

What you say does happen, and it's an interesting perspective (I guess I had always seen the "half-baked history" sections as something annoying but inevitable). Pick your poison, I guess. And the answer is that in general, we do write (short) histories for each paper, unless maybe in short conference papers (limited to 4 pages or so) while it's OK not to write any.