Okay, then how about "pretend you're a human" as opposed to the lizard people who design and write computer software. Spin it however you like. You still have to make the distinction between techies and "the rest of us". Systems have been designed that do not make this distinction and assume the user will be able to figure everything out, the most notorious of which is Unix -- when unadorned with Apple treacle, arguably one of the most user-hostile systems in common use. Normies perceive Unix as being more arrogant than the systems which "condescend" to them. It seems to say "Oh, you don't belong to the super-secret cabal of users who know these arcane commands? Fuck you, then!"

I agree that a message like "This program attempted to do something the system won't allow" would be far more useful, along with a "more info" button with a more detailed error description behind it. It sure beats "oops" and "something went wrong". But people tend to forget what a computer said or did and remember how it made them feel. So the market pressure is toward mollycoddling error messages and away from informative ones.

(Also, the word "oops" was chosen because it connotes "something went wrong and it's our fault" -- probably chosen to avoid implying that it was the user's fault. Really ingenious, again, if your goal is to keep users comfortable rather than fully informing them.)

"Something went wrong" ugh, I HATE it so much, and they don't even dispatch a highly trained team of monkeys to fix it either.