I suspect that, for many people who love this book, the answer to why your complaint didn't bother them is simply that they don't share the complaint. I certainly don't remember thinking the exercises were of a different level than the main text, or off-topic, or confusingly worded. So it's not that having exercises "that might as well have been written in French" doesn't faze me, it's that I don't think that was the case.