The merit of cascading dice

Cascading dice, popularized by The Black Hack as usage dice, is an excellent mechanic. You roll a die, and on 1 or 2 the die size decreases. When the die is reduced below 1d4, the resource you're using is depleted. It's an elegant rule, its fun, and it produces a nice acceleration of degradation near the end. However, the rule is also often described as making book-keeping easier or simplifying things. For example, one reviewer writes

"Every item that has a limited number of uses has a usage die. So, instead of counting every arrow you have, you simply say your arrows have a usage die of d10. Whenever you use the item, you roll the usage die. If you roll a 1 or 2, you step the usage die down. So, if I rolled a 1 on my d10 after firing my bow, I now have d8 arrows. Once you get to d4 and roll a 1 or 2, you are out of whatever the item was. No more marking off each little arrow, torch, etc."

What I want to highlight here is that this statement is perfectly valid in an RPG context, yet it is fundamentally weird. If a person who had no prior experience from any game sat down at your table and you said "your bow has ten arrows", they would immediately understand the bookkeeping involved. Shoot one, deduct one. This simplified approach, on the other hand, requires a paragraph to explain.

The disconnect between perceived simplicity and reality becomes even more marked with rations, which haves you roll your die as often as you would otherwise mark one ration used. In other words: usage dice are a simple system for bookkeeping, but primarily in comparison to a hypothesized much more complex system. Any gamer can come up with tremendously complex systems at the blink of an eye. And that is often our point of comparison. But the reality is that any rule, no matter how simple, is often more burdensome than having no rule at all, because through our successful existence as humans we are already stuffed full of systems and procedures for doing any number of things.

So my contention is this:
Even a very simple rule is often more complex than relying on already existing knowledge. Instead, enjoyable rules often serve to gamify aspects that would otherwise seem uninteresting or unappealing. And one of the major ways of doing this is shifting from managing resources to managing risk.

This is why cascading dice works: not because they make book-keeping simpler but that they gamify an aspect that many gamers find all-too mundane, by transforming it into a risk. But beyond that, I would also argue that this is why low-lever combat is very different than high-level ditto, and why many vastly prefer the former. It is also the reason why wandering monster checks are fairly universally applied, whereas counting rations are less so, and why burn-time of torches become a more urgent matter when you throw away all but one to haul as much loot as you can out of the dungeon. For a large subset of gamers, adjusting to uncertainty and gambling on your odds are much more exciting than logistics.

Because of this, i think that the notion of wilderness travel as a game of resource management is very accurate, but also part of why it has found less traction than dungeon explorations and other forms of adventures.

Basically, I think that any system of wilderness exploration should consider which parts to be left alone (without rules), which parts to keep, and which parts to further gamify by shifting focus from resources to risks.