One of my Seattle coworkers was one of the specific people who I was thinking of when writing the above comment, actually.

I think it's less common now due to stuff like pictures of Marina Bay Sands going viral over the past several years, as well as movies like Crazy Rich Asians "educating" people that Singapore is a modern city. But around ~2010, not so much.

I’m still not seeing it. A lot of my generations introduction to Singapore was via articles like wired’s Disney Land with the Death Penalty (still banned in Singapore to this very day). The Singapore being apart of China is even weirder for someone who knew nothing about Singapore (why would they even know it was populated by mostly ethnic Chinese?).

You're citing a piece of literature that famously contrasts Kowloon Walled City [1] as preferable to Singapore, and yet you are confused why people are misinformed and uneducated about it?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

I didn’t say the article had problems, but Singapore lacking electricity wasn’t one of them.

I think you are making the classic nerd mistake of assuming the average person has done as much self educating as you have.

I heard they don't even have internet in the deep south.

Pretty sure that was true when I was living there (unless 300 bps model dual up counts).