>My heart always falls when I need a result and it turns out the original paper is some terse typewritten notice from the 70s whose first sentence is a definition with a bunch of proper nouns and whose main theorem is given at the most general possible level with no applications at all.

That seems like exactly the thing you want, if you are searching for a particular piece of information, the typesetting aside.

Especially the generality is important if you actually care about the result.