Most scientists don't seem to have a clue. Many actually believe every electron is identical.
This is (simplistically) because every electron is an excitation of the same quantum field. That's why it is a lot more difficult to understand how every electron is identical with just quantum mechanics, even advanced quantum mechanics: at a fundamental level, that all electrons are identical is a consequence of their nature as quantum fields and the properties that characterize quantum fields. It is true that one can show using quantum (statistical) mechanics as well as quantum chemistry and so on that electrons have as a fundamental property that they are characterized by Fermi-Dirac statistics (they are fermions). In fact, in general that certain quantum particles are identical of necessity is given by quantum numbers along with their transformation representation. Further, as in quantum mechanics electrons are complex-valued probability functions that encode key physical properties associated with specific experimental designs and measurement statistics, to say that electrons are identical is merely to label linguistically the set of state-function as such (i.e., as electrons). But one cannot adequately account for much of what electrons are or how they behave outside of at the least QED, which is a field theory, and here the identical nature of electrons is a much more natural consequence: same field, differently locally "excited".
I confess that much of the "science" I read is reported by the media. I'm fully aware that the media lie and is populated with uneducated and ignorant reporters and editors so they mangle every story (and imaginary event) that they report. I frequently decry the failed educational system that has led to this situation.
You seem to apply rather sweeping generalizations and categorizations of "science" based upon what you admit above to be a rather limited exposure.
I lack the interest to try to catch up and somehow my math ability isn't as good as it once was. People see what they believe and in time come to be their beliefs.
Ironically, given that you identify the issue of language and therefore intersubjectivity as a limiting factor in our scientific knowledge, one of the ways in which we can often bypass the limits of language is via math.
When I want to read journals, monographs, volumes, etc., in Indo-European linguistics, classics, Biblical studies, etc., I often find myself reading French or German. There are areas in linguistics and related fields I can only have a limited grasp of precisely because I can't understand and/or don't know the languages they concern or I don't know them adequately enough.
Meanwhile, in just about any section of one of my shelves on anything from neuroscience to neural networks or climatology to cosmology I have monographs or similar texts that are filled with grammatical errors despite having (in some cases) been through more than one edition. This is because in these areas most of the specialists are required to publish most of what they wish to publish in English. That the common language is English is far less important for our purposes here than the reason this is possible for any particular language: mathematics. People can fundamentally disagree over how best to understand tensor product spaces or similar factorizations of probability triples and associated measurable spaces in terms of joint vs. conditional probability and independence. Various incarnations of subjectivists, Bayesianists, frequentists, etc., have seen their respective proponents hotly debating what conditional probability and probability more generally mean/involve (especially within the past few decades with the widespread use of statistics across fields and the ability to apply Bayesian methods thanks to vast improvements in computational methods and capacities). Yet Kolmogorov's axiomatic measure-theoretic treatment remains the standard used by all of the above. Nor do they disagree as to how to what conditional probability is or what Bayes' theorem or rule are in the limited sense; rather, they disagree with what these mean conceptually and therefore how they can or should be understood as underlying justified inference.
Likewise, despite decades of intense debates and an ever-increasing literature full of ever-increasing alternative interpretations of quantum theory, most of the modern world depends on its accuracy and one can be educated as to what quantum theory consists of as well as how to apply it using matrix mechanics or path integrals (and any of a myriad of interpretations) without obtaining conflicting results.
Mathematics is precise where language is not. This does lead to an entirely different slew of problems (such as, for example, the fact that most numerical methods and modeling require computers, and computers understand nothing so everything must be boiled down into mechanical procedures). But it means transcending language barriers in ways that are not possible in other scientific fields.
So, on the one hand, there are areas in certain sciences where communication about findings as well as the subject itself require knowledge of languages in order to make-up for the ways in which language inevitably will fail us in certain respects. In other fields, the polysemy inherent in all linguistic constructions in all languages (not to mention contextuality of constructions) is bypassed via the use formal languages.
In fact, in many fields one cannot do much work without being able to so understand a problem and so fully describe it and its solution that one can communicate both to a machine incapable of understanding anything at all.
Again, this does not make the problems of language disappear entirely and does lead to issues itself, but it is impossible to work in or make sense out of much of modern science in fields like physics without mathematical precision.
And it is precisely such precision that makes it much easier to make sense out of why electrons are all identical than one can with language.
