In my experience, the ones who most fervently believe they have such “clues” are often the same ones who lack them. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve encountered engineers who become indignant when someone tries to redirect them to safe, scalable, and operable ways to solve problems. What they often want is to have the problem solved their way because it would be less work for them or otherwise advance their own personal interests, regardless of the problems that doing so would create or the risks it would pose. They don’t want a discussion; they want a rubber stamp.

Exactly.

Back when I worked at Google there was an internal page someone put up that denoted what they called "the YX problem": the observation that the XY problem, applied to a sufficiently great extent, creates an environment where more productivity is lost convincing one's interlocutor that X is in fact the correct problem to solve than would be lost by chasing X and having to later pivot to Y if that turned out to be wrong.

It's extraordinarily aggravating when it happens. I really wish it was something we talked about more.

There's a fine line here when dealing with customers. Sometimes it works well to answer the exact question, if you can, and follow up with "Can you tell me a bit why you're asking so I can understand a bit more about the problem?" Once you tease out a bit more about how they got there, it's often possible to offer better solutions and it never feels like you blew off their original ask.

Can confirm, I had a coworker doing that a while ago and it was incredibly frustrating. After going through the whole quizzing you still end up with no answer to your actual question, as if they were more interested engaging with their own process and not what you were actually asking

People who really have a clue add enough context in their request to understand why they are trying to do the thing in question.