I wouldn't say all social engineering is a $5 wrench attack. A $5 wrench attack is having physical access to the person and using physical means (handcuffs, prison cells, guns) to convince them to comply.
You’re taking it way too literally. The joke is that all this fancy-pants cryptography is meaningless when the nerds that employ it will mess their britches at the first whiff of real consequence.
I’d also add that a lot of the rhetoric in the cryptocurrency world is based on this very board game-y mentality where it’s like a contest to set the rules up so you win, which completely misses that in the real-world people just choose not to follow your preferred rules.
No police force says “oh, you have impregnable cryptography and a 42 character password, well, we only have one prisoner slot so you can go free now”.
