Your defense boils down to people having an insufficient understanding of zero as an ordinary number, and still clinging to the concept that zero means "nothing" or is otherwise magic.

This hints at a failure of math education.

As an analogy, many (usually, but not always, weaker) programmers still have magic ideas about booleans and comparison operators, and write nonsensical stuff like if (a == true). When you ask them, it's invariably that in their mind, there's mystic connection between comparison operators and if statements.