I think "final" here just means the unit that currently gets treated as publishable and credit-worthy: a theorem with a proof, a solved conjecture, a completed paper, etc
If it's not worth publishing, it's not a result at all. That being said, the problem really is that since LLMs excel at sifting through piles or papers, publishing more would aggravate the problem instead of alleviating it.
Maybe we should start crediting and publishing our intermediate results and attempts.
Humans would gain credit for providing a part of the solution to tough problems, LLMs would profit from the resulting data flywheel.