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These things only become familiar with continued usage. Give it time.

It may become familiar, but it is no less confusing. I had to read that paragraph several times to understand who “they” were.

Yeah, you have to give it time.

That said, the particular paragraph has some problems with antecedents. It could equally have those same problems if you were using other pronouns, like he, she, or it.

It would seem that if there was another word that was gender neutral and that people like to use instead of they would reduce the plural confusion reading problem. I realize that isn’t likely to happen but would solve the technical issue.

Sure. But it is equally possible to reword things to clarify. There are plenty of languages out there that never made the he/she/they distinction in the first place, and plenty of pro-drop languages where you would normally omit the subject of a sentence entirely, if you expect that the listener/reader can infer the subject.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language

It is hard to make the argument that singular “they” is somehow an inherently confusing construct, especially given how prevalent it is in English, and how prevalent it has been for centuries.

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