But even if most people don't know how to consume it, it's a lot easier for a tech support rep to just ask for the numbers, rather than see if booting into safe mode or whatever will work well enough for them to walk the customer through manually adding registry entries (which just seems like a bad idea anyway), so they can get the extra debugging info.
Just leave it visible all the time, Microsoft! It won't hurt, and can certainly help!
I have religiously put debugging information into my error messages for the past decade. Often accompanied with a statement like "Please provide this information when reporting this error". I have supported thousands of users. I can count on one hand the number of times that a user has provided that debugging information to me when it was appropriate to do so. I am the only one who uses that debugging information, when I'm running my own tests.
In fact, sometimes I'll get support requests like "Hey I got this error 012345 what does that mean?" and the attached screenshot will show a message like: "Invalid Password, please type your password again (Error code: 012345)"
I absolutely understand the technical utility, but I really wouldn't be surprised if they have better overall support outcomes without it.
Just leave it visible all the time, Microsoft! It won't hurt, and can certainly help!