alt Hacker NewsPhysics, and to a large degree pure mathematics, has attracted a critical mass of the personality type that needs to feel like the smartest person in the room in any given situation. It has given them a slightly notorious reputation in academia.
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I think that's a common trait of tenured academics in the top 100 universities in the US. Don't know about Europe and elsewhere though. Not so much of nontenure track sorts who do all their dirty work.
From a one-time physics grad student, I do think there advantages to being ... like this.
The flip side of being confidently wrong sometimes is that we treat understanding new systems as something approachable. So, yeah, it's annoying that we don't stay in our lane, but, from my boss's perspective, I'm the only one who's actually willing to just read code, investigate, possibly read a paper, and figure out what's going on instead of punting and saying it's someone else's turf I'm blocked until they get back to me.
Like, ultimately you can't be a knowledge worker by just waiting for answers and instruction from experts and relaying them back and forth. Eventually you have to understand something. And part of that process is being wrong and annoying people.
I've experienced it in industry, too. I recently got out of data science in part because I got tired of working with people who, emboldened by their PhDs in some completely other field, liked to patiently but condescendingly mansplain common, basic misconceptions about my area of expertise to me.
(And it got so much worse once they started using LLMs to aid them in their efforts. Glazing as a service is a hell of a drug.)
So much easier, now that I am a lowly software engineer and can't be held responsible for a certain class of decisions, to just step back and let them be wrong.
As a mathematician, this is far from my experience of actual professional mathematicians, because they encounter people much smarter than them quite often. Maybe more true among graduate students, however.