Yes, we could say that.

“...But by the time you achieve understanding, naturally the necessary insights (those required to cross the gap from a starting point of not understanding) feel obvious, unnecessary to mention, positively insulting to the future reader's intelligence by their simplicity...”

Incorrect appreciation. When I achieved understanding, the insights felt far from obvious up to the point it was necessary to include a warning.
Take into account that that was only an illustrative example of the psychological effect of expecting an immediate understanding but instead finding something very hard to understand.
Thanks for your point of view.

Thanks a lot. Interesting essay and interesting concepts.

I agree with you. I have seen several times how underbudgeted software projects sacrifice general quality due to the reasons you point, and this is later paid in the maintenance phase. I also think that an extreme domain complexity is not the most common cause of the problems.
Another source of maintenance difficulties is the laziness when writing the software documentation. A hard-to-read code can be a good code but very difficult to understand by other person when adequate explanations are unavailable.