It remains true that in a distant discrete future just the event id will do nothing, just as hints to dead relays won't help, but in a continuous timeframe in which the entire network reads these relay hints, associate them with pubkeys and proceed to update their internal "outbox score" everybody goes forward in time better equipped to make sense of all the mentions.
Oh, also event mentions often come with associated "p" tags, so if a client has some clue about where to fetch events from that pubkey they can use those to try to find the mentioned "e" even if all its relay hints are dead (I guess this is also true for note1, but note1s are not helping anyone build all the required understanding in the meantime).
Oddbean new post about login | logout