The culture is the ultimate "reality distortion field." Prefix notation would be seen as intuitive, if that were culturally established. We'd see something like PEMDAS as arbitrary and silly.

Just look at how much content there is around PEMDAS and interpretation of math problems. Clearly, it really isn't "intuitive." We just have this enshrined in the culture. (That said, one of the biggest UX mistakes the designers of Smalltalk made, was to eschew operator precedence!)