I tend to agree with you. But on the other hand, if true, this is the kind of crazy situation that could also lead to new mathematics where regimes considered unstable are revealed to have surprising stable nodes.

The big problem here is that it's described as a wall and not a progressively (quadratically) increasing field.

But what if there actually are network effects propagated by charge carrying particles in a suitably humid environment that turn the power of 2 into something else? Even a power of 3 could be perceived reasonably as a wall at human scale.

It's not "I want to believe" so much as "it feels like the maths might allow this under odd but reproducible circumstances" (my relevant background here is in math-physics and specifically analytic solutions to the relevant PDEs, which do have some very odd solutions). Would be nice to see people try.

There are differences between effects we can observe between ideal point charges and ones that only emerge as network effects when propagated across a network of less than ideal point charges that at least merit some investigation.

I accept that a reel to reel could generate a high static charge field but I would expect anything creating this level of physical phenomenon would be dangerous to humans.

Wouldn’t it be much more likely for someone walking into such a space to become a lightning rod rather than a fly in a spider web?

This pops up at least once a month and has been thoroughly debunked.

Maybe someone here knows a science youtuber (Veritasium/Smarter Every Day etc) with enough clout to try to get an in with 3M or similar and try to reproduce

What do you make of the statement that it pulled in a fly, potentially a bird, yet repels humans?