The “fancy math” associated with quant usually refers to pricing derivatives like options.

The thing is that there isn’t really strong institutional demand for exotic derivatives, people are happy using existing methods and just applying those to current markets.

The other type of fancy math has to do with deriving alpha, which is also not that complex, from a statistics perspective you’re mostly using linear regression or other basic forms of regression.

The hard part of quant is implementation, making sure your data is right, hunting through poorly understood markets, and managing risks carefully and understanding them.

There’s also ML but that’s equally complex in quant as it is anywhere else.