Why should you check the raw event store before adding debug logging when an aggregate's state looks wrong?

The raw event store is the single most direct, most reliable source of truth available in an event-sourced system — every other view of the data, including a read model or an application log, is a derived, secondhand account of what actually happened. Reading the raw sequence for the affected aggregate answers a key diagnostic question in one lookup: if the recorded events themselves tell a clear, correct story, the bug lives downstream, typically in a projection; if the events themselves already look wrong, the bug lives upstream, in a command handler. This turns debugging into a fast binary search instead of a slow crawl through logs or a debugger attached to a running process, and it's exactly the habit experienced Axon developers reach for first.