No, it doesn't make perfect sense. It's a bad practice to leave off units. You just got used to it and seem to have developed pride in being in the in-crowd of people comfortable with an unclear jargon, and that has now blinded you to a bad status quo. Many such cases!

> You’re discounting familiarity as being stupid. The real path is “it was weird but once I spent some time with it, it made perfect sense.”

I don't think either of your parent's paths say that:

> There are two paths: "it was weird but then I got used to it, you're just ignorant" or "it was weird, I got used to it, but we should improve the situation". I know which side I want to be on. Even if it takes decades like the data SI prefixes.

I believe that they're saying that, yes, experts get used to it, after which it makes complete sense (as would any arbitrary but consistent convention, once you got used to it), but, in any living field, there will constantly be non-experts looking to become experts. If there is a way to make the process easier for them while not introducing any lack of precision that would hamper experts, then why not?

The improvement would be to specify the units you're working with, as is well known best practice in all science and engineering disciplines.