I fully support looking at older publications. There are a ton of great older ideas which were unjustly ignored. Or maybe they were rightly ignored at the time,

I fully support looking at older publications. There are a ton of great older ideas which were unjustly ignored. Or maybe they were rightly ignored at the time, but the situation has changed and now those ideas are relevant now. As an example of the latter, Koopman operator theory comes to mind, though I personally am not a fan of Koopman stuff. Koopman operator theory didn't become relevant until computers became powerful enough. During my PhD, I did some deep literature reviews and found tons of valuable papers that were ignored. I was naive at the time. I'm sorry to say that almost no one cared, and my PhD advisor thought it was a waste of time. I get some appreciative emails every once in a while, but that's it. Many academics seem to implicitly assume that if a paper is older than X years, it's not valuable. I hope that attitude will change within my lifetime.