Do Success Stories Cause False Beliefs About Success?

explanations often highlight certain shared traits of successful companies while ignoring others, or turn a blind eye to the unsuccessful companies which exhibit the same “successful” traits.

This. Many unsuccessful founders do the SAME things as successful founders and still fail. They work hard, they do great marketing, etc.

This is why so many "How I [insert-some-success-here]" are BS. If you claim that X, Y, Z are the things that made you successful, that's just your theory. There's a chance that another founder also did X, Y, Z and still failed. Maybe there was an unknown factor that caused X, Y and Z to work for you while that factor wasn't there for the other founders.

I also think that timing is underestimated when it comes to success stories. I've experienced this first-hand; doing a few things that worked amazingly well 2 years ago, then doing the same things 2 years later with 0 results.

Seems relevant to this community. Although honestly this seems like a feature, not a bug — success stories for indie hackers tend to show others that success is possible even if the reasons for success are misattributed. One person's "False beliefs" is another person's "motivation and inspiration".