I guess it's the same thing that makes some people freeze up when they see any math problem, and just assume it isn't something they can handle. 😃
It is absolutely this, in my opinion, and for the same reason as Maths. It pretty much applies to any and all specializations that intersect in our average lives.
A reasonable person might read a medical journal describing the exact set of symptoms they're facing, but being reasonable, they rightfully acknowledge they lack the expertise required to utilize that information and apply it, so they seek a professional.
Another human being who they have been conditioned to believe has dedicated a special amount of effort (and often also characterized as possessing extraordinary traits that allowed/empowered said special effort to work for them in this arena) to the pursuit of mastery in a discipline that they themselves believe they do not have the inclination/ability/time to achieve.
I.e. They go to see a Doctor.
This is the pattern, and for something like medicine, it is both very true, very apt, and very neat and straightforward: Not everyone has the baseline capacity/capital/time/what-have-you to get through Medical school.
Now extrapolate that to "advanced mathematics", and it remains largely true. It does take a very discrete set of parameters to produce a master Mathematician that not everyone has.
But the pattern starts to break down the more granular you get. Not all specializations are created equal, the world has changed, and many aspects of complicated disciplines have ever increasingly intertwined with our daily lives.
Mathematics still works for the next example, but it's time to get back to coding and error messages.
Computer Programming can be a vast and deep discipline, and has a lot of the same baggage as Medicine.
Especially in the minds of those who were born and experienced significant portions of their lives before computing made up more of our lives, and those who were born after computing was commodified down to interfaces that do not require all that expertise.
That leaves us with people, who are stuck interacting in/with systems they conditioned to believe would be beyond them to understand, and they always need an expert.
The joke of course, is that we're all humans within the same capacity bands, and there's as much room between complete ignorance and adept usage, as there is between adept usage, and total mastery.
But most don't dare take that step out of ignorance, they don't think they can be Masters, so what's the point of just being Adept, and that's assuming they even know or believe adepthood is possible.
So instead of reading the error message and thinking back to their interactions with the system and trying to fashion some sort of working model...
They just ping the computer guy.
Ugh. I'm so sorry and angry every time I think on this...
We should bankrupt them faster because it's what they deserve, and the progress needs to be slowed at all costs.
But the reasons why all this is unfolding? Very clear to see, and you even referenced them without really pausing to consider.
Fascism isn't stupider this time around (in so far as being beyond the already astronomical stupidity required to believe it's a solution to fucking anything).
It's desperate. They didn't pivot away from their little spaceship dreams and into AI because it's more profitable. They don't care to come ahead in an economically sound world.
I'm sorry. Time has ran out on the climate and our biosphere, as far as them retaining the properties that allowed us the 'Modern World'.
There is no longer an avenue that averts widespread desolation, and they've known it all along because they don't actually all ignore scientific consensus, they just pay for the masses to ignore it.
It's going to be a gnarly and awful time, but humans aren't wired to just give up and die.
Hence the total surveillance state. Hence the mass casual cruelty with mass deaths. Hence the persecution of anyone who might oppose or see through it.
The world as we know it will be reduced to ashes, in our lifetimes, and we'll have to scramble to do whatever our species will do just to barely persist in some form, as that is just what we do.
They dream of a techno feudalist dreamscape where each little Dragon has their manageable fiefdom composed of a diminished and controllable populace to continue to carry out their self-aggrandizing whims. They can burn all of the economy now, because they're trying to trade it for straight power.
Joke's on them, they'll die by the masses too, and those that don't, will die by the masses. It's not that hard for thousands of angry and with nothing to lose people to go after them.
Their dream of Autonomous Weapon guardians is as laughable as the rest of the stupidity they've attempted and failed at throughout the years: It will be as imperfect a solution to what they're attempting as anything else they've ever done.
But we collectively let them have control of the playground while it was fresh and clean, so now we gotta deal with their bullshit king of the hill fantasies and the results of their evil stupidity.