I am not sure if there was a missunderstandig: I know of people who researched topic X with the assumption to find Y. But they did not find Y and rather found

I am not sure if there was a missunderstandig: I know of people who researched topic X with the assumption to find Y. But they did not find Y and rather found out that their setup was insufficient to provide meaningful answers. So they wrote and explained about why this setup did not work for the original question and published it and moved on. And this makes sense, because they achieved novel information the next student could improve on. So published about a dead end, or not?