Mine too, but this is not very interesting, although our intuition was right, it was almost certainly right for the wrong reasons.

Agreed, this is the real takeaway for those who think it’s unsurprising: they simply haven’t understood why it is surprising.

Definitely!

My understanding of knot theory is limited to having watched a few YouTube videos and reading the first introductory chapters of a book. A neat topic, but not one I'm going to dig too deeply into.

If that is the case the counterexample is the sort of thing a stubborn cynical and amateur mathematician (and programmer) may have found.