More accurately, it’s a colloquialism.

The number of people who fail to overcome it is close to the number of people who never get a grasp of what mathematics is about. Ask them. It comes up all the time.

Yes, but your inference that having a concept of multiplication as repeated addition leads people to “not grasp mathematics” is backwards.

I have seen little evidence that people who become interested in mathematics have an unusually difficult time “overcoming” this viewpoint.

Their difficulty letting go of repeated addition leads them to consider mathematics opaque, and they lose interest.