This is in no way meant to be any criticism of the OP, but yes if you are close to conformance of the scheduled departure time you are better off going to connections rather than exiting landside and going up to security. Conformance will normally work off scheduled departure time rather than the estimated delayed departure time.

Conformance can sometimes be less than 35 minutes for connections if going via flight connections, especially for domestic flights. Also when there is lots of disruption they do effectively turn off conformance as it can start to get in the way - but I don't know if that relaxation may be limited to the connections route only. You can get put back on a flight if you have failed conformance and been offloaded, and things like status, HBO, and a delayed departure will help. But this isn't a trivial task, and trying to get someone to do it last night when there were lots of cancellations would have been quite tricky.