“Discovered, currently not indexed” is usually the worse of the two signals, because it means Google has not even judged the page worth crawling yet. The two labels sit at different stages and point at different problems, so collapsing them into one “not indexed” worry hides the thing you actually need to fix.
“Crawled, currently not indexed” means Google fetched the page, evaluated it, and decided not to index it. That is a page-level verdict: the content was seen and did not clear the value bar, often because it is thin or duplicates another page. It is a problem about this specific page’s quality. “Discovered, currently not indexed” means Google knows the URL exists but has not crawled it at all. The page is sitting in a queue Google keeps deprioritizing, usually because crawl demand is low, and crawl demand is shaped by how important the page looks and, more broadly, how much Google trusts the site. That makes Discovered closer to a site-level priority signal than a single-page one.
That is why Discovered is generally the heavier signal: a page Google declines to even crawl is one it has pre-judged as low priority based on its surroundings, which often points at weak internal linking or a site Google is not confident enough in to spend crawl budget on. The honest caveat is that Discovered can also just mean the page is new or the site is slow to be crawled, so a small, recent count is not always alarming.
The reason the distinction matters is that the fixes diverge. Crawled-not-indexed is fixed at the page: improve the content, resolve duplication, make the page genuinely worth indexing. Discovered-not-indexed is fixed by raising priority: strengthen internal links to the page, improve overall site quality, and clean up crawl waste so Google has the budget and the reason to fetch it. Read your own report and name which one you have, because pouring content fixes into a Discovered problem, or crawl-priority work into a Crawled one, treats the wrong layer.