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> I feel like this needs diagrams.

And there's the problem.

All of that stuff is well and good, but it seems like I have to have a fair degree of knowledge and technical skill, not to mention time and effort, to confirm that everything is as they're representing. And it's time and effort I'd have to expend on an ongoing basis.

That's not an expectation I could realistically meet, so in practice, I still have to just trust them.

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In most of modern life we trust to experts to some degree. I couldn't off the top of my head explain DH key exchange, I don't know if I'll ever understand elliptic curves, but I see that most of the cryptographic community understands them as good methods for many problems and if lots of experts who otherwise argue about anything will agree "what yes, of course DH is good for key exchange but that's beside the point and djb is still wrong about florbnitz keys" then it's likely DH is indeed good for key exchange.

If everyone had to understand every detail to trust in tech we would not have nuclear plants or coast around on huge flammable piles of charged lithium

In theory, you trust the "crowd" (rather than the hosting entity) because if they don't do what they said, the "crowd" should make a noise about it and you would know.

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