Certainly a referendum this vague. People were asked to vote for either status quo or... something very ill defined. Witness the ‘yes’ voters suddenly surprised they’re losing their jobs because the deal doesn’t cover selling live eels or sausages or banking services or whatever to Europe.

It’s easy to say “they condemned themselves” and they _were_ naive to buy into the cake-type Brexit narrative, but if the choice had been between status quo and “we’ll try to negotiate this sort of attainable deal”, people would have had some idea on what they were voting for. As it was, it could have been anything from Norway+ to autarky.