alt Hacker NewsMath educators like Grant Sanderson (3blue1brown) use it in a very specific way: the goal of a mathematical explanation is to make the learner feel like they could have come up with something. And a really good mathematical communicator can absolutely do that.
A piece like this which uses it in a headline but in no way makes an average reader feel like they could have come up with it is just badly misjudging how good of an explanation it is.
I don’t think “you” in these titles ever really refers to an “average reader”. Some familiarity with the field is required. Imagine how non-programmers (and many programmers) feel about some examples I just Googled:
“You Could Have Invented Parser Combinators”
“You Could Have Invented Container Runtimes”
“You Could Have Invented Git”
Given the references to “mathematicians”, I think this reaction is more about an unfamiliarity with the concept of applied mathematics, which is ironic for practitioners in a field containing so much that is (or should be) regarded that way.
Software used to be all about “discrete math”, logic, maybe a bit of queuing theory…and now suddenly linear algebra and statistics became important. Don’t panic, it’s just another textbook on the shelf.