It's bad communication. You need to follow up the vague analogies with real examples to make a message stick. If you don't, people have no idea what you are saying.
The limitation is not cognitive, it's a matter of efficiency. We could, if we wanted to, make a lamp with all custom parts with the maximum efficiency possible in the design, but those efficiency gains would be at the cost of extremely difficult manufacturing. It's a tradeoff that the human body can make because it needs to produce only one (or two) legs, while us humans mass manufacture the stuff we make.
I am not in favor of ignoring those cognitive limitations. That wouldn't make the limitations go away; it would only keep us from taking measures to cope with them, such as dividing and specializing design into modular generic parts.
The desk lamp can be designed around common parts to reduce the total number of unique parts in the world, so everything is reusable, replaceable, manufacturable in larger quantities so there's more resources to optimize the process, etc.