There is however another very powerful aspect of the phrase: it suggests that something is not obvious. This makes it very powerful when correcting someone without making them feel like they said something stupid. "The sun is yellow" "You'd think that. But it turns out that without the atmosphere the sun is actually a blueish white, and high on the sky it's a neutral white"

Right, to tease apart some other subtext it might be used with:

1. This stuff is is tricky, and that's normal.

2. We are both on the same side trying to understand it.

3. The stuff is interesting.

That’s exactly how I try to use the phrase, usually when pushing back against falsified ideas I likely accepted to some degree myself and later looked into. Like the whole thing with alpha/beta male wolf mythology vs real observation in the wild.

Incidentally, just yesterday I learned the sun is “white”, because I was looking at why veins are bluish (despite low oxygen blood actually being just dark red) and looking into light scattering effects that are the cause.

There's a collection of Ben Goldacre's articles compiled in a book called "I Think You'll Find It's A Bit More Complicated Than That", which is a phrase I want to put on a T-shirt, or possibly my Teams background at work.

I don't see the example would be different in conveying the same meaning if you omit the whole "85 turns out that".