Steelmanning is a way of generating theories you’d want to consider or develop, it doesn’t by itself give them much credence. So it shouldn’t be a problem to steelman anything (just as it shouldn’t be a problem to hypothesize anything), the failure mode is justifying credence in a resulting theory on the grounds that it was obtained by steelmanning. There is also often no particular reason to expect a steelman to be relevant to its inciting incident.
Steelmanning is a way of generating theories you’d want to consider or develop, it doesn’t by itself give them much credence. So it shouldn’t be a problem to steelman anything (just as it shouldn’t be a problem to hypothesize anything), the failure mode is justifying credence in a resulting theory on the grounds that it was obtained by steelmanning. There is also often no particular reason to expect a steelman to be relevant to its inciting incident.
But what about understanding things which are unclear?