I think you are right. Plain English is a terrible language for higher math. It's extremely misleading (especially when talking about infinite objects and probability, where most of the mystery and confusion comes from terms that aren't precisely defined in the reader's mind).
I enjoyed quanta magazine for a while. But I think they ended up pretty much exhausting the set of things that can be explained to an interested audience with a bit more English, but doesn't take actual mathematics. I know enough about this topic to know that reading the article didn't teach me anything useful because I don't know enough to understand what they are saying. And if I did know enough, this article probably still wouldn't effectively teach me because it's too simplified.
I haven't seen a quanta article in a while that I found useful. I appreciate the attempt but I don't think it works anymore. And I don't think it's their "fault"... I just think the slice of things this works for was smaller than we might have liked.
