The practice of substituting pronouns can also be used to make text easier to understand, for example:

    The client connected to the server, then it crashed

vs

    The client connected to the server, then the server crashed.

That's actually an example of making it more confusing. Did the client crash?

Okay, it's obvious to you that the client didn't crash (but should it be obvious? Clients can crash too, you know!), but for anyone who didn't make the right inference, or isn't sure, they now have a dangling node in their mental model and are still validating they understood it right as they read the next sentences.

If you really can't stand such repetition, go with "then the latter crashed".

Someone tells you "the server crashed" and that's confusing? The list of things that happened after the connection attempt is one item: The server crashed. Unless you think the writer is actively trying to trick you, I think you can probably assume the client's crashing would be on the list if it had happened. It's a good convention to follow because cataloguing non-events is tedious: "I ate breakfast and did not choke and did not have any allergic reactions and my house wasn't hit by an airplane and 57 porcupines didn't try to crawl up my butt and breakfast did not consist of filet mignon nor pizza nor cauliflower nor rocks..."

Oh I thought the “it” version was being presented as less confusing.

Ah, no wonder!

Ahh "former" and "latter" - for people that like to use these terms, just repeat the damn word.

I find the use of these terms does the reader a disservice by giving them additional cognitive load.

You typically end up having to go back and read whatever was written again.

It's an interesting example to confuse most advanced `AI's. They just don't understand what `it' refers to in the first sentence.