That would be a fertile area of investigation; we could do more of that, and less of trying to find the angle that allows us to declare it's all made up and doesn't matter.
Personally, I think there's two things going on. First, reactive checks are generally treated differently than proactive action declarations. I think they lead to an inversion of the normal process. Instead of declaration an action, evaluating, and then narrating results, the binary result is assumed, evaluation occurs, and then a small filler action is declared to justify the outcome.
I think the whole thing could be clarified by moving perception (and possibly knowledge type skills) to be defenses. That, and/or responsibility could be clarified around who actually narrates an appropriate interstitial action. You can certainly imagine the player rolling a 2 and saying "Darkelf is distracted by the bookshelf and not paying attention" without prompting.
The second thing going on is a matter of scale; the rune example reaches way further back in time and outside of the character. You're not filling in an interstitial action within the last minute or so, you're filling in an action taken by someone else an indeterminate amount of time in the past, whoever carved the runes in the first place.
