While also bearing in mind the important point that Toriyama's audience was always, from the manga's entire 1984 through 1995 run, that of Japanese grade school age boys.
The implicit, unconscious bias that easily north of 90% of DB's present day Western/English Language fandom often fully operates under in their blanket assumptions is that Toriyama MUST have had DB's narrative, from day one in 1984, totally take into account American/Western audiences anywhere from five to ten years AFTER the series completed its original 11 year long Japanese run (a run who's scale and longevity Toriyama clearly didn't have the slightest inkling would come about at the start), and cater it specifically for them and take fully into account Asian cultural concepts that they might not be familiar with.
And the fact that Toriyama failed to fully predict and jump ahead of these global cultural gaps and snags back when he was making his first ever doodles of Pilaf and Yamucha (perhaps he misplaced his Baba-esque crystal ball sometime around when he was wrapping up Dr. Slump?) thus makes him a shitty storyteller, and the entire Dragon Ball franchise an inherently badly told story as a result.
Because honestly, who among us haven't run into the TOTALLY common, everyday problem of just casually brain farting out a seemingly silly, piffle of a dumb little kung fu fantasy comic book for 6 year olds that CLEARLY was destined from moment one to be a global pop culture juggernaut and take off like wildfire in the mainstream of numerous foreign markets - sometimes as late as nearly a solid decade AFTER its already completed its blockbuster native run - and thus have to plan ahead for what to do when the inevitable happens and foreigners from literally the opposite side of the fucking planet decades into the future are gonna have this dumb little kung fu fantasy comic (and its cartoon TV adaptation) be their first ever exposure to thuddingly basic Taoist myths and concepts, and thus you have to be 100% sure to seed into the story's beginning as many Kindergarten basic rundowns of your culture's archaic spiritual beliefs that act as the foundation for the entire narrative's basic premise?
I mean we've ALL been THERE before, amirite? Lazy hack that Toriyama is.
This assumptive framing (which is on its face ludicrously idiotic and silly once you stop and think about it for even five seconds) ALSO presupposes up front that Toriyama - a guy who celebrity manga artist status (and the financial lifestyle that comes with it) and insane levels of drawing talent aside, is otherwise in most other respects a fairly average Japanese man - would somehow have ANY idea whatsoever what the fuck exact Asian cultural concepts a Western audience might or might not have any familiarity with in the first place.
This is a door that does indeed swing both ways: just as many average Westerners have no idea that these distinctively Chinese storytelling tropes are incredibly widespread culturally throughout many parts of Asia (certainly most parts where Buddhist/Daoist beliefs have taken widespread root), so too would most average Asian people (many of whom have never set foot on Western soil themselves, or in some cases perhaps may well have never even MET a Westerner before) have utterly NO idea that these concepts are NOT so well known throughout many parts of the Western world.
That's kind of the whole rub about unconscious, baked-in cultural biases: they're by their very nature and definition things that most people DON'T immediately realize are there coloring their thinking (to even VERY significant and overwhelming degrees) and are VERY commonly taken completely for granted by most people unless they're specifically highlighted and examined closely: no matter if you're American, European, Chinese, Japanese, Middle Eastern, Russian, etc. Its just a fundamental and fairly universal quirk of human psychology.
And I think that might be where the root of some of the misunderstanding/miscommunication in this particular thread might be coming from.
