When should a product remember a user’s last choice?

One small UX decision I run into in product design is whether a product should remember what the user selected last time.

Filters, view modes, selected projects, table settings. Remembering these choices can save users from repeating the same setup every time they come back.

But it can also create confusion.

A user returns days later, sees a different result than expected, and doesn’t realize an old setting is still being applied.

So I don’t think “remember the user’s preference” is always automatically better UX.

I’ve started looking at it more as a question of whether the previous choice still represents the user’s intent in the next session.

How do you decide which user choices should persist, and which ones should reset to a default?