[groby_b]

"a technique called regression analysis that, as far as I can determine, cannot be explained in a simple, intuitive way (especially not in terms of how it "controls for" confounders)"

That sounds very much like a skills issue. Because it can. You call out what you consider might be confounders as independent variables (covariates). You can then use regression analysis to estimate the individual contributions from each confounder, and control for them by essentially filtering out that contribution.

Is reality harder than that? Yes. Much. The world of science isn't 9th grade math, sorry. You are not entitled to understand everything deeply with 5 minutes of mediocre effort.