I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree, but I'm reminded of how it's said that Fermat's Last Theorem wasn't really the goal (or even that the truth or falsity of FLT doesn't imply anything interesting on its own), but it's an extremely vital problem from a development-of-math perspective.

Ideals were discovered by Dedekind as a solution to an error made by Gabriel Lamé in his claimed proof of Fermat's Last Theorem: he'd overlooked that not all rings have the same properties as Z. In this situation, they were missing "unique factorization", which Kummer "fixed" by hypothesizing the existence of "ideal numbers", which Dedekind later formalized as "ideals". This was a huge step forward for the development of modern algebra.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-crazy-number-that-almost-...

And that's setting aside a lot of algebraic number theory, class field theory, and so on.