I am baffled how someone representing themselves as a veteran aerospace engineer - especially someone claiming to have GNC experience - could make such a frankly ignorant claim.
When you're out of ammunition, fix bayonets and charge. Similarly the gambit for the conspiracy theorist who has been caught pretending to be an engineer is to amplify the boldness until it's time for the flounce. He still probably believes he can get a few people to believe he knows enough about what he's talking about to give him benefit of the doubt.
I know you're answering with strictly NASA materials because the challenge was thrown that NASA didn't know about them. But taking it to the opposite extreme, the notion that no one knows how to accomplish and orbital rendezvous is literally ignorant. One doesn't have to go to NASA to learn it; it's in all the textbooks, and the same principles are followed in commercial endeavors. It's provably correct in how it follows from first principles in basic physics, and it's demonstrably correct in how it's done by people who aren't NASA. It's literally as ignorant as saying that calculus must be fake and no one knows how to do it, and if NASA claims to know how to do calculus they're wrong. It's the sort of claim you make if your starting premise is that NASA is evil.
This is the layman's intuitive concept of the relationship among knowledge, NASA, and the rest of the world. Most layman believe that NASA is the fount of all knowledge regarding space, and that people who purport to operate in space do so dumbly only because NASA tells them how and could convincingly lie to them if necessary. Hence in this model, "orbital rendezvous" is a mystery no one knows about, and NASA claims to have accomplished it by means only NASA knows, and which might in fact turn out to be totally bogus if examined by anyone else.
The "black box" model of NASA is laughably comical to anyone who actually works in aerospace. There you realize just how much NASA depends on the aerospace industry (and associated academic institutions) to spoon-feed them technology, innovation, and operational equipment and know-how. NASA is primarily a funding agency, with the actual work being carried out by industry and academia. And these industrial and academic partners do the same sort of work for commercial clients. The industry, collectively, and the academic partners, also collectively, hold the repository of operational space flight experience. They employ it for NASA, just as they employ it for others. Orbital rendezvous works for NASA because it works for everyone else, and there's no hiding it.
