Well, it's 2024, I'm a biologist, I read the thing about schemes, and I still don't understand what they are or how they would help me understand biology any better.
I'm an applied mathematician (Ph.D. in math but never a professor) and I did not want to try to understand the description of schemes in the obituary. I thought that the obituary was too technical for me. On the other hand, if I thought that schemes were useful for my work, then I would dig into them and try to understand them.