I work in the field of cryptography and I agree with GP, papers and research goes in all sorts of direction, but very little actually ends up forming a solid br

I work in the field of cryptography and I agree with GP, papers and research goes in all sorts of direction, but very little actually ends up forming a solid branch of knowledge. Sometimes if people aggregate into such a branch, there’ll be SoK papers (systemization of knowledge) that will start popping to make the tip of that branch understandable, and at some point people will create all sorts of resources including university courses and textbooks. But that’s rare, and it demands a lot of hypes, and sometimes tips of branches just go overlooked for a long time. If the author dies or move on, it’s possible that nobody can really take over the work easily, because there’s no proof, or nobody understands it, etc. Afterall, this is what happened to a lot of famous mathematicians. Their texts were forgotten, and then rediscovered a very long time later, and sometimes proofs could not be recovered for a long time (cf Fermat)