Ok, so what if I live just outside the cone? What does that mean? The map is the same color for 1 mile from the cone and 1,000 miles from the cone. The map is flawed not the people looking at it.
So a scientifically literate person who understands confidence intervals looks at that plot. How do they tell how likely they are to get hit? Keep in mind that the size of the hurricane isn’t shown at all.
You have to real about halfway through the fine print to learn:
Historical data indicate that the entire 5-day path of the center of the tropical cyclone will remain within the cone about 60-70% of the time.
It does not say the distribution is Gaussian, and I suspect it’s actually much longer-railed than a Gaussian would be.