I think you're thinking of something different to the issue in the parent comment. The most vexing parse is, as the name suggests, a problem at the parsing stage rather than the earlier lexing phase. Unlike the referenced lexing problem, it does't require any hack for compilers to deal with it. That's because it's not really a problem for the compiler; it's humans that find it surprising.
Given all the things that were new to the author in the article, I wouldn’t be shocked at all. There’s just a huge number of things to know, or to have come across.
