Sure, it's extremely frustrating to have someone come in and throw the baby out with the bathwater (wait is that a "mental model"?) and apply a bunch of surface pattern matching to a problem on which you have genuine expertise.

On the other hand, we don't always have the deep expertise necessary to find optimal solutions to any given problem. Sometimes lateral thinking is useful, and I see no problem with having a bunch of established patterns that you can use as different lenses to approach difficult problems.

The other thing is that these high-level models serve as an aid to communication. Of course this is risky since "the map is not the territory" (sorry couldn't resist), but as an expert the first thing you must realize is that the vast majority of people (even smart ones) will never understand your area of expertise to a tenth of the depth you do. These mental models can give a shortcut to understanding in a more general way than ad-hoc metaphors; it won't be perfect but it's better in most cases than a complete failure to be understood.