Its extremely useful in sports. We evaluate batters on OPS vs RBI, and no one ever evaluated them on runs they happened to score. We talk all the time about a QB and his linemen working together and the receivers. If all we talked about was the immediate cause we'd miss all that.

I'm not saying we ignore all other causes in sports analysis, I'm saying it doesn't make sense to pretend that there's no "one person" who hit the home run or scored a touchdown. Of course it's usually a team effort but we still attribute a score to one person.

The best example for this is aviation. Insanely complex from the machines to the processes to the situations to the people, all interconnected and constantly interacting. But we still do "root cause" analyses and based on those findings try to improve every point in the system that failed or contributed to the failure, because that's how we get a safer aviation industry. It's definitely worked.