My lead said to always pull the logbook on a squawk, but a busted panel light in Boise taught me the opposite
A guy on my crew at the Boise hangar kept telling everyone to pull the full logbook any time a pilot wrote up a squawk, and I did it for the first six months. Then one night a 737 came in with a flickering dome light in the aft galley, and I spent two hours digging through history when the whole thing was a loose canon plug I found in ten minutes with a flashlight. The logbook told me nothing. The airplane told me everything. Now I look at the actual problem first and only pull history when the trail goes cold, and my turn times dropped from 90 minutes to about 40 on stuff like that. Anybody else had a lead push a rule that just did not hold up on the floor?
Read a piece from an old A&P about how squawk history is mostly useful when you already know what you are chasing, not as a first move. His point was that the plane shows you the problem if you just stop and look at it, and the paper only helps once you are stuck. Your dome light story is the same lesson with a canon plug instead of a wire bundle.