I'm trying to replace the places in my templates where I look up nodes by nodeId to look up nodes by their documentType and where they appear in the node hierarchy.

// original reference
var content = Umbraco.Content(1000);

// new version
var current = CurrentPage.AncestorOrSelf();
var content = current.Descendants("ContentDocumentType");

The new version works inconsistently. If I leave the Umbraco.Content(1000) above the new code (without declaring content), then current.Descendants("ContentDocumentType") returns something, but if I remove that line and publish a different node (specifically a childnode of the ContentDocumentType node), then current.Descendants("ContentDocumentType") returns an empty collection.

Why does current.Descendants("ContentDocumentType") behave inconsistently?

Is there a better way to retrieve nodes without looking them up by nodeId?

Thanks in advance.