In my part of the world, there are at least a dozen+ culinary and/or medicinal mushrooms that are distinctive and easy to identify (even by casuals like me). These don’t really have any dangerous look-a-likes that also grow in the same area. I stick to those and those alone. Granted, even at 12 or so species that I can ID, that’s probably like a tiny fraction of the number of different species that exist in this area.
I’m the opposite, I can tell some really difficult mushrooms apart due to good ol’ hyperfixation but I still know jack about plants and trees.
Some areas have mushrooms that are so similar the only reliable way to identify them is using a spore print.
Plants and animals tend to have more distinct identifying features like leaf patterns, bark texture or hair color.
To be fair, knowing 10000 things is far from knowing everything.
So in Chinese traditions “10000” is just a stand in for “really big number”. Kind of like how, at least here in the states, well say “there’s a million of them”. Not that there is literally 1,000,000 of the thing, but more there is just a lot of them.
there’s a myriad of phrases like that
Yeah, a ton
