Which part of this comment:

> Maybe the article is dumbing it down too much, but the conclusion seems unsurprising. Why shouldn't a single unknotting do double-duty in some cases?

is them "explicitly stat[ing] they might be misunderstanding"? At best they said that the article is at fault for oversimplifying the topic.

Author of the comment you're quoting, and it is indeed my roundabout way of suggesting I'm missing something.

Clearly, I'm not a knot theory expert, but the way the article presents it makes me wonder what extra nuance motivated the original (now falsified) conjecture.