But I still think you are “confusing the remedy for a problem with its cause” — a quote from this text on Pinyin.info, and that it is precisely the characters that force people into a self-perpetrating cycle of writing stuff that is ambiguous if spoken.

Not that I think abandonment of characters would necessarily be easy or helpful at this point. Zev Handel has helped convince me (see some discussion on this pinyin.info post) that there are some really deep-rooted monsters in that idea. And not that it matters what I think! But I still think there’s a lot of confusion about cause and effect.

I think you are right. The word following is just omitted, leaving just the 的。