There's a difference between explaining the entire topic and just giving you a very broad strokes approach to get you started learning the subject on your own. Nobody's having any delusions about summarizing a complex subject to a few sentences to substitute learning it the hard way, but if you can't give a very gentle explanation that can ease people in to the subject so they can get started by themselves, I would say that you don't fully understand the subject.
Also, I would add that this explanation is not universal at all. You have to be able to gauge your audience and adapt to what's most suitable.
I agree cs 101 is not the world. I also agree some concepts cannot be simplified and it shouldn't.
My point was what you hinted towards when you say "distilling things down". My gripe is that most people that have taught or guided me have had no inclination to do that. I would have had a much smoother learning curve for it.
I also feel if there is a concept that can be taught by one person to another, it can be slowly be presented in increasing order of complexity than be presented all at once. That feeling of slowly building or adding complexity is underestimated and hard.
But I also do research, and I absolutely do not expect deeply technical topics like advances in aerospace engineering or gene regulation or cosmology to have "simple explanations" that I can understand. I accept that I won't understand them without years of effort, and I won't denigrate experts in those fields because of my limitations.
I tell people to come up with elevator pitches for complex work all the time, but I don't evaluate the quality of a thinker by the quality of their elevator pitch.