I'm not sure the position is significant.

It's free to put any bad thing in the risks section of your 10-K; investors aren't going to shun your company over it. If you fail to put the risk in, the bad thing happens, and your company loses value, on the other hand, you may get sued for securities fraud - and courts have been oddly receptive to these suits.

It's like any other clause that gets added to any other mostly-boilerplate legal document over time: one firm adds it, pretty soon everyone copies their work and it's a standard term. It's viral. How fast this spreads among company filings is a matter of epidemiology, not something that actually tells you the companies' outlook.

I'm not sure it is either, I don't read enough 10-Ks to make a strong claim here, it's just always felt like the ones I've read have been vaguely ordered by importance, and I wonder if that's actually true or not.