PEMDAS isn’t obvious to “common people”?

Everyone is taught the rules of Maths

If “×” means “groups of,”

It means repeated addition actually

“2+2×4” means “two plus two groups of four”

No, it means 2+2+2+2+2

Sure the order of operations could be arbitrarily different

No they can't

I feel like we settled on that order because it simply makes more sense intuitively

It's because Multiplication is defined as repeated addition, so if you don't do it before addition you get wrong answers