It's a good response, which I hope they'll receive genuinely. But when someone responds with a two-part treatise, my suspicion is that it's usually not about you, so I wouldn't take it as a personal scolding.

What I often see, autistic or not, is that people often respond to broader issues reflected in the wording and framing of an individual comment and want to respond to that. This is fair and acceptable as long as one differentiates which part is responding to the individual comment(ator) and which part is the broader issue.

Ironically @SaphiraGrace, while providing great information about autism spectrum, has made assumptions about you and your own experiences by lecturing you about not making assumptions, rather than asking you about what you meant.

Still this is in context of neurodivergent folks getting the shafted end of assumptions in general, so I must respect that. It does demonstrate though that reflecting on our own assumptions and treating each other kindly is something everyone must practice if we are to be responsible for how our behaviour impacts others, whether we're neurodivergent or not.

To address your question about high functioning and masking. Those definitely do not imply a "desaturated autism", such is simply a social perception from outsiders.

Somewhere within the values of their colour wheel there is potential to develop certain skills. Some of those skills may as you say blend in either because they are the same skill or they developed an unique skill that is perceived as normalcy.

Different situations require different skills, being in a classroom is different from being at home, a dinner party or having to take the bus.

Some kids may have it easier to be perceived as high functional in your class because they have matching skills. But are unable to function in any other situations. They are masking in the sense that you are unable to perceive that they do not function the same way in situations where you are not there. In fact your personal experience may make your an easier person to talk to and create a bias of seeing higher functions. I know an example of someone who functioned very well in school, never was suspected of being related to autism, believed they where normal themselves, had a friend group, good grades. Then ended up in a mental facility months after graduating because they had no way of understanding how life worked or how to maintain there current social relations beyond the very rigid and rule based nature of the school they had been going to.

The kids who developed their own skills may appear not recognizable within this group but may actual suffer an intense energy drain that you can't see. Potentially crashing some other times. They are masking what i would call a form of imposer syndrome. They only show what they know you will accept as normal. For me this means showing results and hiding the methods. I am biased to call this group highly (differently) functional because i am a part of it. But my experience is that people genuinely often do not understand my natural flow of reasoning and constructive thinking to the point of dismissal and ridicule. But i have learned how to frame my results in a form that they will recognize as the correct answer (even if i feel that answer is barely acceptably accurate).

There are times i am so drained and so low i stop being able to form sentences properly and people who don't know me well will look at me like i am clearly intellectually challenged (i am reasoning perfectly fine within my mind, i don't need language to do so), then other times i impress someone with something basic and now they expect me to be a genius every single task. This is the "why" the distinctions of mild or severe is harmful. Correct functioning is always bound to a context to function within.