> It seems to me that one consequence of the "Theory Building View" is that: instead of focusing on delivering the artifact or the documentation of said artifact, one should instead focus on documenting how the artifact can be re-implemented by somebody else. Or in other words optimise for "revival" of a "dead" programs.

Arguably, this is the entire spirit of academia, which mildly serves as a counter example, or at least illustrates the challenges with what you are describing - even in something where the stated goal is reproducibility, you still have a replication crisis. Though to be fair, I think part of the problem there is that, like you said, people focus too much on “documenting the artifact” and not “documenting how to produce the artifact,” but this is often because the process is often “merely” technical and not theoretical (and thus not publishable) despite being where most of the hard work and problem solving and edge case resolution and so on happened.

Edit: oh, and I would also mentioned, that the kind of comment you’ve described which focuses on why some process exists in the form it does to better explain how it does what it does aligns closely with Osterhout’s notion of a good comment in A Philosophy of Software Design.