I would say rather that the "standard example" is simplified, but it does capture an essential truth about the vectors. The surprise is not that the real world is complicated and nothing is simply expressible as a vector and that treating it as such doesn't 100% work in every way in every circumstance all of the time. That's obvious. Everyone who might work with embeddings gets it, and if they don't, they soon will. The surprise is that it does work as well as it does and does seem to be capturing more than a naive skepticism would expect.