Hot take; After 20 years in marketing: dashboards are where insight goes to die

First time posting here, so go easy on me.

I've spent 20+ years running marketing and brand, and there's one frustration I've never escaped: every analytics tool can tell me what happened last month, but none of them remember the context around it, or why it mattered. Every reporting cycle starts from zero. The context lives in someone's head until they leave, and then it's gone. Then you end up at the end of the year trying to recall what the dip in the third week of March was..

I'm curious whether this is just me or a shared thing:

• How do you actually keep track of why a number moved, months later? Notion doc? A spreadsheet nobody updates? Vibes?

• Has any tool ever genuinely "remembered" your company context and gotten smarter over time (takes the lessons forward into future decisions), or do they all reset every login?

• And the one that gets me: does anything you use ever go back and check whether its own recommendation actually worked?

Genuinely want to hear how people handle this, because I've tried a lot of tools and mostly ended up building my own workarounds.

(Full disclosure: I'm launching something in this space on PH soon, which is why it's on my mind. Not linking it here, just want the honest conversation first.)