One annoying feature of the inverted pyramid structure is that it often isn’t clear to the reader. The reader reads on and things keep getting rehashed in more and more (not necessarily interesting) detail, and to the reader it’s not clear that the article is effectively already done in its scope and no new point will be coming up (although they’re not even halfway through the article), until they give up because it just keeps endlessly meandering on.
This is how I feel about a lot of books, such as The Lean Startup. Technically, there's a new topic with every chapter, but after the first 100 pages or so I feel like I get the gist, and I'm not really learning much new.
A lot of modern book publishing has turned into a bit of a bait and switch grift. You take 2 post-it notes worth of ideas and pad them out to 300 pages with tangentially related anecdotes, because on average people buy books online based on the title and the page count alone, and put them on a shelf for several years before they read them, meaning they can't return them by the time they find out.
Which is why my first read is just skimming the book, marking important passages. Then I read just these passages, write notes down, and put the book away. But I often buy heavily discounted books.
Publications can avoid frustration from repetition related to the inverted pyramid structure by clearly splitting up the multiple levels of details they provide As you say the inverted pyramid structure can lead to repetition. If this isn't made clear to the reader it can be confusing and frustrating for the reader. One common solution to this is to use a convention that clearly separates the levels of detail. In newspapers a common way of doing this is to first have a headline with the key point, then for the second level, a short summary in a different font, say italics, and finally the full article at the third level. In scientific articles, there is the title and abstract with similar functions. Books can have many levels, with a title, subtitle, summary on the back, foreword, preface and introductory chapter.
Couldn't you do something like "I did X by YYYing after working around P by doing Z and Q by doing A. Here are some details about how I worked around P and Q and my strategy for YYY."?
My technical writing course stressed that structure should be obvious. Better awkwardly obvious than so subtle people miss it.
