I disagree. Many problems are abstract and so we have to build "cartoon" models of what's going on, trying to distill the essence of the problem down to a simp

I disagree. Many problems are abstract and so we have to build "cartoon" models of what's going on, trying to distill the essence of the problem down to a simple narrative for what the shape of the problem space is and where the limitations are. That often works but backfires when the cartoon is wrong or some assumptions are violated about when the cartoon description works. Results like this are pretty rare, nowadays, and I suspect this happened because the problem was niche enough or some new idea has had time to ferment that could be applied to this region. This seems like a pretty foundational result, so maybe I'm wrong about that for this case. A lot of progress is made when there's deeper knowledge about the problem space along with some maturity for when these cartoon descriptions are invalid.