It's amazing how often "how it works" is taken for granted. This reminds me of the trend of racing bicycle tires. It used to be "obvious" that you wanted to run a skinny narrow tire at high pressure, for better aerodynamic and rolling efficiency. Even when they started wind tunnel (for tires and wheels) and rolling resistance testing, it was done on steel rollers, not on actual road surfaces. It was assumed that rough roads caused efficiency losses primarily in tire flex (heat), so it made sense to keep pressures high.
In the past decade or so, there's been a radical shift towards wider tires and wheels. There are a lot of people riding/racing on 28-32mm wide tires where you would have been laughed at a decade ago, and told to go back to the "efficient" 23mm wide tires. 10-15 years ago, you'd want to be running 120psi on a 23mm wide tire and today you want to run your tire pressure as LOW as possible, and run a wider tire to compensate, to give more air volume to spread the load and bumps across. The rolling resistance is LOWER, because they've found that the energy losses from rough roads or from bumps is in the tremendous amount of energy expended to move the 150-200lbs of "unsuspended" rider and bicycle up and down rapidly. You're losing single-digit watts in rolling resistance on that lower pressure tire, but saving tens or hundreds of watts in energy that would be lost moving the rider's mass up and down.
I'm not kidding about the "laughed at" part, either. I'm looking up how wide a tire I can fit on my 12 year old road bike, and there are plenty of downright ABUSIVE forum posts from just 6 or 8 years ago, telling people to go buy a mountain bike if they want to run wider than 25mm tires on my particular bicycle, where I'm trying to fit a 28 and would really like to run a 32 if possible.
And a lot of these findings started off as "huh, that's weird" when testing newer wheel shapes in the real world.
https://cyclingtips.com/2016/08/cyclingtips-podcast-episode-...