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Kawoomba comments on Dangers of steelmanning / principle of charity - Less Wrong
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Steelmanning is optimal * when looking for true beliefs about the world **, as long as you're aware that the source of the argument only provided a weaker form of the argument ***.
* In an environment without any resource constraints, which unfortunately never is the case. Still, if you got time on your hands and nothing else to do ...
** Arguments in their maximally persuasive form have more potential to shift your beliefs in the correct direction. Neglecting a potential strong form of an argument is tantamount to ignoring evidence.
*** So steelmanning the cold fusion crackpot's argument may have brought you to firmly believe in cold fusion, that's fine as long as you don't forget that the crackpot still believes in the right conclusion for the wrong reasons (the weak form of the argument), and is as such still a crackpot.
Of course, if you're finding that someone seems to repeatedly arrive at the right conclusion for "the wrong reasons" you should take this as evidence that said reasons are better than you thought.
In such cases, it more-often-than-not seems to me that the arguer has arrived at their conclusion through intuition, and is now attempting to work back to defensible arguments without those arguments being ones that would convince them, if they didn't first have the intuition.
Not necessarily. Survivorship bias.