There are other emotional reactions which should register as confusion but don't.

Imagine a smart person who sees asphalt being deposited to pave a road. "How disgusting," they think. "Surely our civilization can think of something better than this." They spend a few minutes ruminating on various solutions for road construction and maintenance that would obviously be better than asphalt and then get distracted and never think about it again.

They thus manage to never realize that asphalt is a fantastic solution to this problem, that stacks of PhDs have been written on asphalt chemistry and thermal processes, that it's a highly optimized, cheap, self-healing material, that it's the most economical solution by leaps and bounds. All they noticed was disgust based purely on error and ignorance.

Any thought of the form "That's stupid, I can easily see a better way" should qualify as confusion.

As the old joke goes, Alzheimer's is the best illness, there is no pain and each morning you get lots of interesting news.

But note that improving the model would result in less pleasant experiences of wonder, but also in less unpleasant experiences of disappointment. Basically you reduce your variance, but it's not obvious to me that you imperfect model necessarily has a pessimistic bias.