Now that the journey system no longer does so, new players will likely skip right past it and not find it until dozens of hours later due to it being at the far corner of the map. The current journey encourages you quite early to start finding coal and iron, which leads you north, not west. After this, you’ll likely see no reason or forget about going back and exploring the far end of a river at the corner of the map when progress expands in other directions.
That was me, the new player. I was informed you used to get nudged there before, but it no longer exists. I didn’t discover it until almost 70 hours of playtime, far after I had already encountered the archivist and so forth.