Skip one step in the recipe and the whole cake remembers.

Some processes hide their dependencies. A step can look decorative right up until the thing it was holding together fails, and by then you cannot insert it. The result does not tell you which step was missing. It just comes out wrong in a way that is hard to diagnose.

When you want to skip something, find out what it is actually for before you drop it. Sometimes it genuinely does not matter and you have found a real shortcut. When you cannot tell, do it the long way once and learn what it was doing.