As a fellow neanderthal and after going through several tutorials and math videos on how PPO works, i still fail to grasp its intuition. I wanted to believe that I am not a dumb person, so instead, I blame PPO and RL for lacking a cohesive story that ties parts of the math to its mechanisms. Here is a fabricated story that strives to make an attempt. It is mainly for myself but if it helps please let me know.
References: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/de1b44ef-e3a0-4bf1-99ed-f0b1edb9338e