I sort of agree with you--but on the other hand, I have spent many years training myself to have enough of an understanding in a variety of areas so that I can often understand exciting-sounding papers in various fields.

For a while, for practice, I would just read Science and Nature cover to cover, allowing myself to look up a maximum of two things per article to help me understand, and stopping that paper as soon as I hit a figure that I didn't understand. I've let this slide for the past couple decades, but the training still helps.

So that is another option--don't jump on every trendy thing that you don't understand, but train yourself to understand (enough of) more things.

(It doesn't work with mathematics or theoretical physics. That stuff is impossible without serious training.)