Yes, unfortunately they didn’t include the explanatory writings in the 14th Amendment. I wish they would have. But to be fair they didn’t foresee how imprudent and suicidal their posterity would be.
This is one of the problems with the English language and law. Sometimes things can be interpreted in more than one way, and lawyers are always trying to use the wrong interpretation as a gimmick to get what they want.
The people who wrote it, debated it, and voted on it had a specific meaning in mind, and then later courts came along and ignored the clear proof of what they meant in favor of an interpretation they did not mean.