That's why I talked about implied reliance, as opposed to what people explicitly "know about". Surfacing the actual practical rules behind what practitioners are doing is arguably a theorist's job, but many theorists are not fully comfortable with the kind of thinking that this would require.

(The 'Rule of the Octave', which is the kind of rule I'm pointing to, was quite exceptional in being explicitly taught in actual published treatises about music - and even that was practically forgotten later on; it's not usually taught in "introductory music theory" classes even though it arguably should be!)