I wrote a (very long) blog post about those viral math problems and am looking for feedback, especially from people who are not convinced that the problem is ambiguous.
It’s about a 30min read so thank you in advance if you really take the time to read it, but I think it’s worth it if you joined such discussions in the past, but I’m probably biased because I wrote it :)
Regarding your first part in general true, but in this case the sheer amount of calculators for both conventions show that this is indeed intended behavior.
Regarding your second point I tried to address that in the “distributive property” section, maybe I need to rewrite it a bit to be more clear.