It’s a bit more complicated than this. Of course you can represent any information with any kind of coding schema but here the truck to find a schema that’s also reasonably efficient. As so often, this is about compression. In the context of human language, the problem is finding the smallest set of lexical concepts such that you can express a wide range of meanings with minimal combinations. A lexical principal component analysis if you want.

But yes, quite a lot of things about languages have been subject to unhealthy sensationalism, like the story with “over 50 words for snow in Eskimo” or “Piranhas unable to count”. Linguistics is not that easy.