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Something useful, submitted with good intentions, will be received well, regardless of when you submit it.

Not true, sadly. In my experience there is a big element of luck, and the headline matters a lot.

For example, my most popular ever submission (1341 upvotes) didn't get a single upvote when I submitted 4 months earlier under a slightly different headline.

Of course title matters, and your title wasn't "slightly different", it was very different.

"See this page fetch itself, byte by byte, over TLS" - repost

"Annotated Live TLS 1.3 Session" - original

The reposted title was way more interesting

Well, yes and no. I’d say the new headline was very similar content, albeit pitched a bit differently. :)

I usually try not to repost, because I think it’s rightly frowned on, but I do have a few less extreme examples where the exact same post got to the front page a second time after sinking without trace the first. It seems kind of obvious that the timeline of the first few upvotes is critical, and somewhat random.

This is why, in marketing, you'll hear mantras like "spend 80% of your time writing the hook (title)"

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