You appear to be incapable of understanding any middle ground between "obviously incorrect" and "obviously correct." Is the concept of uncertainty that foreign to you?
The only uncertainty is OP's use of "back then", "from memory", "maybe", "could have", etc... without providing any evidence to support their statement.
The claim is testable, in theory. You didn't test it, nor did anyone else here, so the fact that it's testable doesn't remove any uncertainty.
It's not feasible to test in any practical way.
You said it yourself:
> If what you're trying to convey is that abstract reasoning based on fundamental principles without any consideration of real-world complications is a superior approach to determining what's true, well, I reject that.
Enjoy :)