Still, no, it should not surprise anyone (if they are thoroughly rational) that oxygen could be produced from means other than photosynthesis, from sources that are not living things. This is not even strictly because a person would have already been speculating based on precursor contemporary investigation. While it might defy personal expectations (or assumptions if they went further than expecting it), or be far removed from someone's surface-dwelling experiences or the scientific concepts familiar to them, dark oxygen, like all scientific and broader concepts, is not ultimately possible or impossible in light of what is observed empirically or reportedly observed by scientists far from one's residence.
Such a thing as dark oxygen, like many other scientific and other metaphysical events or entities, does not contradict logical axioms, and so, since it is consistent with them, is capable of being true; in other words, it is logically possible. A ramification is that even if it is/was not true that there is oxygen created in the lightless depths of the ocean apart from photosynthetic phenomena, it still could have been the case that the natural world was this way. A person is not likely to think of concepts like those of supernovas or quantum teleportation or radioactive decay or dark oxygen apart from some sort of experiential prompting (spurred by direct sensory experience or hearsay), but experience and the physical world perceived do not dictate logical possibility. Consistency with logical necessities does. In this sense, no one has a basis to be surprised that the likes of dark oxygen are possible.
Perhaps a given individual is surprised upon hearing that nonliving things are empirically supposed to produce oxygen because sensory and hearsay evidence--remember, absolutely no one can know if their visual sense is accurate or not and they certainly cannot know what is happening on the ocean floor because of what someone else tells them [1]--previously supported the idea of only certain living things producing oxygen. This is not irrational because it does not require that anyone made assumptions or believed anything contrary to logical necessity and to what is suggested by available yet always fallible scientific evidence (the two are not the same [2]!). They did not assume, and they made no errors of any kind.
It would be possible for someone to think about the concept of dark oxygen ahead of time and realize that it is logically possible, whatever the current scientific paradigm is. As improbable as this is and utterly philosophically unnecessary as it would be ahead of time, it could be done, yet a person is not irrational whatsoever for not thinking of dark oxygen before some sort of claimed scientific evidence is brought forth for it. Whether they think about it with or without a particular kind of sensory promoting, however, it is within everyone's reach to see that the objective logical possibility of any scientific matter is intrinsically dictated by consistency with logical axioms, which cannot be false, and other necessary truths. Seeming outlandish or surprising due to experiential unfamiliarity has nothing to do with this one way or another.
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