It’s been a while since I’ve done serious statistical work (I’m a logician. There’s many different kinds of distributions (i.e. lines through a field), from which you would make very different inferences - relationships which satisfy a power law can of look like a Gaussian/normal distribution. Finding the “right” distribution when you know you’re working with incomplete data isn’t simple.

I can assure you they aren’t trying to make the math look scary - to be a bit blunt, a comment like that’s usually a sign that someone hasn’t made a serious attempt to engage with a field. That sort of bad faith regarding a core discipline of the mathematical sciences probably should be downvoted.