Yes, especially when trying to reconstruct the timeline and context of related research, to help understand the methodology and implicit (lack of) reasoning. Wi

Yes, especially when trying to reconstruct the timeline and context of related research, to help understand the methodology and implicit (lack of) reasoning. With time context one can often go from "why would they do it like that?" to, "given that X wasn't discovered at the time, it makes sense that they did it like that".