> The relevance of this is that had the object indeed been discovered earlier, then there would have been some possibility that humanity could have mounted an intercept mission, a recourse that was out-of-the-question by the time 3I/ATLAS was actually detected
The only kind of intercept mission that would make sense to me from a game theory perspective is a totally blind, large scale thermonuclear weapon strike. The first thing that it wakes up to shouldn't be a harmless probe that can only phone home the bad news.
Here's an interesting PBS Space Time video [1], "Dark Forest: Should We NOT Contact Aliens?", that goes over some of the game theory that a civilization might want to consider when deciding how visible to allow themselves to be to others.
In many asian languages idioms of 4 characters (Chinese: Chengyu, Japanese: Yojijukugo) are used for concepts, and when many of these are packed tightly together the intent is frequently to either flaunt language ability or sound very smart.
They can also be moderately impenetrable to early language learners.