Comment by pseudohadamard

Nor does the claim "The most powerful primitive that has been conceived in cryptography is obfuscation". A good test for how useful a cryptographic primitive is is "if you magically removed this from existence, would any attackers notice?". For this one the answer would be "no".

I'd say the actual most powerful primitive in crypto is KDFs/MACs (there's some overlap, e.g. HKDF). Remove that and pretty much everything that requires security would collapse overnight. Not just the obvious TLS and SSH but the global payments infrastructure and a lot of other less-visible things.