> wont accept clear straightforward plain language explanation of what others want

From experience this feels to me like a very NT thing to say (apologies if you're not NT, no context to determine either way) - it comes across as written: "Why can't you just do what I ask you".

Often it feels atypical people require a logical understanding from first principles of why something should be done.

Then, once they have that they need to come to the same conclusion of what the course of action is.

If they're aligned, awesome.

If not, then the work is to try to make them understand why, given the current constraints and cultural context, their optimal approach is suboptimal in this situation.

Something as simple as "yes your idea is great, it will work better then theirs, but sometimes others need to fail so that they can learn from their failure" - exact quote.

I'm speaking to a very limited subset here based on quite a bit of exposure in many contexts.

"Neuroatypical" shows up in many, many ways.