Evolution theory as taught in government schools skips some important details that makes it reasonable to reject. Natural evolution is one thing, very slow with many variations on a theme, but what humans experienced was highly unusual and has not been duplicated. There is some unexplained environmental pressure driving the need for increasing human intelligence far in excess of that needed for basic survival, and it does not apply to anything else. It is not natural evolution, but super-natural evolution. One explanation is this special pressure is tribal warfare, which is driven by human vanity and envy. If so, the word human really means war maker, something libtards could never accept. We are killers to the bone and that DNA cannot be suppressed by leftist indoctrination in the government schools. Until they teach a theory of human evolution that plausibly adds up, people are completely reasonable in rejecting it.
I tend to be more of a believer in directed evolution because as you point out, humans stand out among all the species on the planet.
While the great apes are amazingly advanced, they don’t show any sign of ever becoming more than they are and haven’t changed at all since well before there were modern humans.