If anything deserves to be patronizing, it is probably high-energy physics. The reader should not expect to truly understand anything, or be able to deduce anything, after reading the pop-sci explanations of particle physics experiments.

Analogies have the problem that you never know where they stop, and so you can't safely reason any further from what you've been told. It is bad if you walk away thinking you know more than you really do.

If you're not reading the math, you're fundamentally in the business of being told simplified stories made up of lies we tell to children. If anything, the article that makes you feel like a 5th grader is honest. As far as I'm concerned, it might still be talking up to me.

Well argued. Once I was very into this and took pride in being able to read through Planck, Einstein and derive wave mechanics from first principles. At 50, when it comes to modern theoretical physics I do feel like a 5th grader again. I am still interested. While in other subject areas I remain at multiple PhD level we can't stay match-fit at every intellectual game forever. So I don't see this as necessarily being written for 5th graders, though I am grateful for good science writing to keep up interest for people like myself who are super interested but need the 5th grader down-talking to stand in for pages of equations that are now well beyond me to follow.