There's something unbelievably funny to me that actual mathematical papers have to cite a 4chan post. It does make me wonder how much hidden knowledge is hidden in parts of the internet; maybe this is the only genius mathematical thing we've found on 4chan...
What comes to mind is TempleOS, I'm confident there's a lot of really interesting code decisions and algorithms in there. Of course the other factor is your own comprehension powers; I can't comprehend math or complex algorithms, so I don't actually know if there are any that I could apply to my usual software development problems. (I doubt it, it's high level front end stuff, all the complex bits are lower down)
I don’t know enough about operating systems to really know if there’s anything clever in there, but that gets to your point; part of the issue comes down to the ability to understand what you’re reading, as you pointed out.
If I had seen the original 4chan post back when it was new, I wouldn’t have thought much of it, because I don’t know anything about superpermutations or combinatorics. If I had seen the post, I would have thought “oh there’s some math I never learned, cool” and moved on, not realizing its significance.