Is your assertion that no one has ever written "we tried some stuff on the small inexpensive platform first, then moved to the bigger more expensive platform with the more promising options" in a research paper or literally anywhere else?

I honestly don't think I have.

In this case, using a cheap(er) signal or heuristic as an initial filter before spending more resources on cases that pass the filter is a pattern that shows up all over the place, and LLMs are good at picking up on patterns like that and generalizing them. AFAICT.