The formal term is irony, because what they are presenting is actually a "Reductio ad absurdum", but they don't understand why their argument is absurd.
If you want a case and point of this, imagine a comedian proposing this idea dripping with sarcasm and clever little jokes, sort of what John Oliver does. The overall absurdity would be obvious, and everyone would understand the suggestion is a bad idea, with a little bit of honey to go with the vinegar.
The people often presenting this sort of unintentionally ironic argument don't seem to recognize the idiocy or exclusivity of the thing they're suggesting. Lacking understanding of the absurdity of the situation is the definition of their ignorance, because the burden of understanding and proof are on the person presenting the argument, not the audience. (Everyone is ignorant in some way, and nobody is even close to knowing everything. You're being dramatic if you really think that way, even for a second.)
So the data nerd in me is struggling with your framing a bit. HIIT for people with "aerobically poor systems" may resemble slow jogging or fast walking based on HR alone. Also outside of analyzing blood serum or glucose monitors, there isn't much of a reliable way to secondarily analyze the lactate threshold (actually). There are metabolite analysis that can be done, or things like creatine supplementation to facilitate the "smooth" transfer between aerobic and anaerobic processes, but on a fundamental level, my understanding as a lay person, is aerobic exercise produces lactic acid as a byproduct, and anaerobic exercise uses lactic acid as a fuel source. That is the reason anaerobic capacity decreases, as your lactate threshold increases. The real reason you are subject to a much greater degree of boom-bust is "lactate threshold training" is about increasing the physiological load the body is capable of sustained aerobic capacity for exercise (which is what you're saying), primarily by training your body to increase the amount of available glycogen. That's really only useful in the context of running and a few other endurance sports, and is hardly a metric of overall health.
Also IIRC the story of Marathon was relevant because the runner died to deliver the message. That sort of implies, despite the feat, that not everyone should be able to do that, nor should they.
HIIT conceptually depends on what your body does in a given state, not a unit of exercise. I would wager large sums of money the people that are overeager to engage with higher and higher intensities are not actually looking or reading the metrics of their own bodies, and adapting the behavior accordingly. It's not really about want or "determination" lol, it's about what you do to get your heart rate in a given place, and the fluctuations that produce an effect, given the systems in your body.
You kinda strawman these "HIIT people", as if they're actually doing HIIT, or as if they represent everyone. Autonomic dysfunction, based on overtraining syndrome or overexertion is not the same thing as observing a HIIT protocol based on your own biometrics. It's honestly hilarious, because HIIT and interval training at large is specifically designed to avoid OTS, especially where it relates to the serious damage that can occur to the vascular system, musculature, and ligaments, once scaling up the duration with a similar level of intensity occurs. Running a 5km in less than 20 minutes is a perfect example of a not very good metric actually. There are plenty of people that could put themselves at risk of damaging themselves to do such a jaunt. It is a very light entry point, but arguably is a good metric for elaborating on why training is important to be able to accomplish physical feats safely, but there's kind of a packaged Ableism in your argument that I kind of find distasteful. If your doctor looks at blood serum, analyze heart rates under stress loads, and examines blood oxygen under stress and during sleep, you can pretty much guarantee they will arrive at some degree of analysis that could prove (outside exception of health conditions or illness) a degree of general health and fitness.
I understand running is important to you, personally and culturally. Don't attack tools in the toolbox of fitness, just because you see other people using them wrong (edit: you did say you do use it). Everything in the world is a nail if you're holding a hammer, etc etc.
Conceptually, most of what you said is sound, but yeah. I think you're a nerd for process, which is cool, making kind of misguided arguments that are not really about what we're talking about here, which is why the article observes a principle experimentally we've known works for over a century. Also I personally like HIIT, interval training, and HIRT especially for all of the reasons I've described. :)
That... doesn't sound like HIIT. HIIT shouldn't average out to anaerobic heart rate ranges, otherwise you really lose the benefit of keeping your heart engaged in aerobic ranges during the rests. And to be honest, HIIT used for recreation shouldn't even peak in the elevated ranges above 167 bpm, if you're talking about doing it safely over years for health. Higher than that might be effective in training to increase aerobic capacity or lower your overall heart rate, but may damage your heart over time.
The effect of taking those controls on HIIT should result in reducing the autonomic stress response of /all/ exercise on heart rate, not increasing it. The demonstrated effect of HIIT is being able to efficiently scale aerobic capacity without increasing the time required and prolonged physical stress on the body. That's why Olympic athletes have been using interval training for a century, and from the 90s to this day, have used HIIT techniques like Tabata to increase their overall ability to exercise for a long duration, without having to actually commit to exercising for repeated long durations.
I'm not sure where you got that piece of information about loads of people with great anaerobic "metabolism" vs aerobic "metabolism". It would truly be very difficult, but not impossible to consistently raise your anaerobic capacity, (which I'm guessing is the implied relation to processing lactic acid efficiently as a fuel source for exercise?) but not raise your aerobic capacity also. Most of the ways I have seen that involve some kind of ketosis, or something that would otherwise deprive the body of the baseline glucose to drive aerobic capacity up in tandem with anaerobic capacity (because there's just not available excess glucose to store as glycogen in muscles beyond basal mechanical muscle operation and may lead to atrophy from burning muscle as a fuel source a.k.a. awful orange piss). And generally you would have a hard time building up extra muscle in that state as well, so it would be generally not advisable/possibly extremely dangerous to do so without proper diet and nutrition.
disclaimer - I am not an exercise physiologist or certified in any way. I'm an idiot on the internet, so please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong or don't have it quite right
This is because maintaining inertia is efficient, despite the stress on the system. This is the reason High Intensity Interval Training and High Intensity Resistance Training work at all, because you're making a conscious effort in your exercise methodology to eliminate momentum and acceleration from the movements, which increases the work done within the context of your body, reducing the exerted energy lost to mechanical inefficiency of repeated movements.
You don't even need to stop moving while walking to see this effect in action. Just try walking so slow that you've eliminated almost all the momentum from the motion of walking. Just try it for a minute straight and see how it feels. (Forewarning: It's going to look ridiculous, like you're walking in slow motion.)
[TW: SPOILERS] I don't understand how something like this can be critical, but 'conveniently' ignore fundamental conceits of the narrative that led the characters to the formation of the Dark Forest Hypothesis, such as the technological explosion capacity of advanced galactic civilizations, which was a huge talking point in the trilogy. It was literally the reason why the Trisolarans utilized the Sophons /to halt technological progress of human research past a certain boundary/ by having the Sophons manipulate the results of any microscopic-scale particle experiments of scientists across the globe. (You know, the thing that causes a bunch of scientists to kill themselves and spur the plot of the first book into action)
Also disclaimer: didn't read past the paywall because lol paywall