I think part of the issue here is you're talking about people estimating future accomplishment where they have no skill, and all variations of these experiments are people assessing how they performed on a test they just took. There's very likely a difference between someone doing open-ended talking wildly in a field where they don't even know what's possible and an introspective assessment of themselves on a concrete task they just completed.
And where they got feedback. What the original paper presented turns out to be a tautology: in the absence of feedback, people don't know if they performed well or poorly.
