In my experience [0], the grant funding tends to be something more akin to "We will attempt to further characterize area X, using tools Y and Z, which we expect to be involved in important area A, but has not been proven so, yet". The granularity I'm speaking to is at the lab-notebook level, give or take. If I'm performing an assay, formally documenting the premise, evidence supporting that premise, and result under that grant heading would mean we could easily publish both negative and positive results for a given study.

One of the areas I helped write a paper for as an undergraduate was later proven to have a completely different mechanistic understanding than we proposed. I think having this more detailed set of observations would have helped both us and any people citing our paper come to this conclusion earlier. Physics is great at this [1] - seeing "dark matter" or something unexplainable is an opportunity, but many fields treat presenting something as 'unexplainable' as a weakness.

[0] I don't have experience in particle physics or anything of that nature where you're working on constructing something like the LHC

[1] Once again, outside observer bias