Maybe this detracts from my previous agreement with the quote, but there's a difference between explaining in person, vs. explaining in writing for a general audience. With the former, you can get immediate feedback as to which parts you're not explaining well and appropriately redirect your focus, while in the latter you have to cover all the possible confusions.

This phenomenon was revealed most starkly in one of the articles in the quantum physics sequences, when I replied to the article by saying,

So, decoherence is a valid scientific theory because it makes the same, correct predictions as the one involving collapse, but is simpler.

There, that didn't take 2800 words, now, did it?

And Eliezer Yudkowsky said in response:

Silas: I've tried just saying that to people, it doesn't work. Doesn't work in academic physics either. Besides which, it may not be the last time the question comes up, and there's no reason why physicists shouldn't know the (epistemic) math.

The fact that something can be explained simply doesn't deny the problem of inferential distance, in my view; it just means that each step is simple, not that there won't be many steps depending on how much of the listener's knowledge you can build on.