As I grew up in the 80s, there were two kinds of gifted kids in school: The kind that would ace everything anyway, and the kind that, for a variety of reasons, lacked the regulation abilities to manage the school setting well, with the slow classes and such. A lot of very smart people just failed academically, because the system didn't work for them. Some of those improved their executive function enough as they went past their teenage years, and are now making a lot of money in difficult fields.
So what happens when we do make accomodations to them? That their peaky, gifted performance comes out, they don't get ejected by the school systems anywhere near as often as they were before, and now end up in top institutions. Because they really are both very smart and disabled at the same time.
you can even see this in tech workplaces: The percentages of workers that are neurodivergent is much higher than usual, but it's not as if tech hires them out of compassion, but because there's a big cadre or neurodivergent people that are just in the line where they are very productive workers anyway. So it should be no surprise that in instutitutions searching for performance, the number of people that qualify for affordances for certain mental disabilities just goes way up.
That's not to say that there cannot be people that are just cheating, but it doesn't take much time in a class with gifted kids to realize that no, it's not just cheating. You can find someone, say, suffering in a dialectic-centric english class, where just following the conversation is a problem, while they are outright bored with the highest difficulty technical AP classes available, because they find them very easy.
Of course, that applies to everybody who achieves a stable career at all.
Exceedingly few people (if anyone) are competent and capable at everything, even when you're just talking about basic skills that are handy for common, everyday work.
Your doctor may be a incorrigibly terrible driver, your bus driver may pass out at the sight of blood, your Michelin chef might have been never made sense of geometry, your mechanic may need deep focus just to read through a manual, your bricklayer might go into a panic if they need to stand in front of a crowd, your bartender may never have experienced a clear thought before 11am.
Struggling with some things, even deeply struggling, is normal if not universal. But once you age past the gauntlet of general education that specifically tests all these things, the hope is that you can just sort of flow like water into a valuable enough community role that you can take care of yourself and help some people.
A lot of modern, aspiring-middle-class and online culture stirs up an idea that there must be something unusual about you if you find this thing or that thing difficult, when the reality is that everybody has a few things that they struggle with quite a lot, and that the people who seem like they don't have just succeeded at avoiding, delegating, or hiding whatever it is that's hard for them.
> A lot of modern, aspiring-middle-class and online culture
Theres also a pernicious way of identifying with the struggle. Instead of I have trouble focusing in certain situations, so maybe I should find ways to spend my time (careers, hobbies) that work well with that. We instead go to 'I have ADHD' and my 'job' should make special accommodations for me.
Regardless of whether a job should or should not make accommodations. It's not a very helpful construct to think they should. It removes agency from the person experiencing the struggle. Which in turn puts them farther from finding a place that they would fit in well.
For the vast majority of behaviors (ADHD, attachment issues, autism, etc) they exist on a continuum and are adaptive/helpful in certain situations. By pathologizing them, we(society) loose touch for what they mean in our life. It also makes discourse hard because the (this is causing me to truly not be able to function) gets mixed in with the (this is a way that my brain behaves, but I can mostly live a life).
They're both two sides of the same coin though. You can get a neurodivergent person to a level that they're able to function in life, but they won't thrive or be happy.
Do we think it's enough for people do be a productive worker or do we actually want to give them the ability to live their life to its fullest?