It's understandably the natural place to get the dramatic tension from what at least purports to be a sober account with some momentum. It's reasonably consistent with the way it's treated on the lectures I've seen from Sir Andrew Wiles on YouTube.

It sounds like a nightmare. He had intentionally set the proof up in a high stakes way, working in private, very quiet on what he was really doing. I gather this is not the done thing, eccentric at best kind of vibes, and I think by that point it was almost crackpot adjacent to even try seriously. His advisor forcefully pushed him off even trying earlier. So it's compound on the stakes. The beg reveal is intentionally as dramatic as possible. And then the questions start to land, most are minor clarifications, notation deficits, but one is sticky, one won't go away.

Kept me up late reading about it.

It would have to show something new and interesting.

Indeed there isn't such tradition. I have one or two results like that -- proofs that some proof strategies cannot work because some object does not exist, but since that object would not be interesting for anyone not trying that particular proof strategy for that particular (already obscure) problem, one cannot publish.

Typically, you can describe that in the form of a partial result (see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldbach%27s_conjecture#Partia...) or as another conjecture.

There is a related tradition of making conjectures about things that you can not prove, and being known for having made such conjectures. Conjectures along with definitions and problem statements are incredibly important in mathematics. But usually they are introduced in the context of some other publishable work.

Arguably mathematics should have pre-registration, so you can see who has tried what before, rather than just by knowing everyone in your field. As LLMs progress, we might get pre-registration of LLM-aided research. "We plan to spend $10K on Fable tokens to look at conjecture X is algebraic co-homology."