To do science, you don’t need to start with the dawn of all human knowledge and then work forward. You start with the current state of knowledge and go from there. Learning the history of science is helpful for shaping your intuitions and giving you perspective, but you don’t actually have to read Darwin, for example, to do evolutionary biology.
As Mumford observed almost a century ago, the world loses its soul when we place too much weight on the ideal of total quantification. By doing so, we stop valuing what we know to be true, but can’t articulate. Rituals lose their significance, possessions lose their meaning, and things are valued only for their apparent utility.
The problem is that when the internet keeps showing you the same viewpoint over and over until, at some point, it stops feeling like an opinion and starts feeling like fact.
Processes also serve as repositories of institutional memory. They carry lessons from countless past cases, often unknown to the person following the process. Problems once encountered, solutions once devised, all of that is encoded into a set of steps.