I'm not so sure. I think a degree of shut up and calculate if you actually want to get a physicists level understanding, a large degree. But I strongly believe that it's no harder to give a clever layman a working understanding of the underlying concepts, in purely conceptual terms. Honestly, I think the reason the quantum mechanics has been so prone to pop-sci charlatans is that legitimate science communicators keep trying to explain it in interpretation-agnostic terms, which makes it sound far more mystical and paradoxical than it is.