Overriding block removal in Magento 2

[Talesh]

Our team is having a problem with Magento 2 layouts. Reading this link  I gather that if we wish to re-enable a block that was removed in the blank theme, all we need to do is switch the referenceBlock to have an attribute remove="false" in our overrding XML file. However making that change is having no effect on the blocks being displayed on the frontend for us. The most that we can find is a Github post that is redirecting the original poster back here. Since he didn't post, my question is:

Is there anything else special beyond the documented XML changes that needs to be done to override a block removal in Magento 2?

-T

[Talesh]

Additional info (and stealthy subtle bump):

We are trying to override checkout_index_index.xml in a theme layout override. 

[sherrie]

Were you able to get this sorted @Talesh?

[Talesh]

No solution yet. When I get resolution I'll post, here and update the docs with a PR if it wasn't some minor thing missing on our end.