Us programmers like to distill everything down to rigid sets of rules because that's how our mind operates. The fewer probabilistic "analog" parameters, the better. Of course the real world doesn't work this way.
It is by no mean specific to programmers. Ask to someone who learns French, for instance. Rules with too many arbitrary exceptions.
What is specific to programmers is that their tool performs at its best with simpler rules, so their job is to find the necessary and sufficient set of rules - and will dismiss most of the cases pointed by this article as unimportant exceptions the software won't handle.
I took French in middle school, and it was always a running joke that the teacher spent the first 5 minutes on the rule, and the next 40 minutes on the exceptions.
Either there is a simple rule and well known exceptions we learn at school (she would also know) or we get into the area of "this is what this is, just learn it by heart".
And then suddenly, someday, I discover there is an obscure rule with complicated words that addresses the question.
English is a foreign language to me. But I somehow managed to learn it without learning the rules. I can say things correctly-ish without being able to explain why I used this particular grammar.