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It's certainly possible they were strategically pretending not to understand. If the assumption is reasonable (and "that doesn't mean someone who produces zero value" is reasonable), strategically pretending not to understand is a way to derail the conversation and is just plain dishonest. You can just respond to the whole thing including the implicit assumption--yes they can say "I didn't mean that", but then they're the one being dishonest since they obviously did. If you really expect that response you can say "even assuming you mean 1000 times an average worker, that still doesn't make sense because...."
Your standard encourages useless nitpicking. The things that normal people say are full of implicit assumptions and expecting them not to use any just makes things worse for everyone. It isn't helpful to not let people say "the sun rises in the east" because there are places where it rises in the west.
My standard encourages nitpicking, yes, but it's often not useless. Your standard encourages putting one over on people by allowing the use of implicit assumptions while getting the benefit of the statement without the qualification.
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