Why does "I never recognize 90% of the people" mean "I never recognize more than 10% of the people"?

Apparently, "I never recognize 90% of the people" means that each time you can only recognize less than 10 percent of the people. (Cf. comments under this video.) My naive syntactic preconceptions tells me that never means "there is no time/occasion, such that ..." which would tell you that the sentence should mean "There was no occasion (and never will be), on which I recognized 90% (or more) of the people", in contradiction to the apparently prevalent interpretation of the sentence. Somehow, the 90% came to refer to the number of people you don't recognize.

I would like to understand how this works exactly. Interestingly, the German literal translation "Ich erkenne nie 90% der Leute" doesn't work in the former sense and would rather be interpreted as conveying the "logical" sense. So what is the grammatical difference in these two superficially identically structured sentences?

Edit: I'm not interested in stylistic recommendations, as I understand that it is colloquial and ambiguous and therefore should be avoided in formal writing. But as it is a phrase some native speakers produce spontaneously and most others seem to have no problem parsing it the intended way (at least given an appropriate context), I would like to understand how the syntax gets reanalyzed syntactically to yield that meaning. but would like to understand

never is not being used in its literal sense to mean "at no time". It's instead being used to indicate a negative state that persists through all time. So it's short for

At all times, I don't recognize 90% of the people.

or more succinctly

I don't ever recognize 90% of the people.

Never means "there is no time such that". While the obvious interpretation of "I never recognize 90% of the people" would be "There is no time such that I recognize as many as 90% of the people present", it is not too far of a leap to interpret it as "There is no time such that there isn't a set of 90% of everyone present which I do not recognize anyone within."

What makes this expression strange is that it takes two negative expressions and deletes them both, without making sure to flip things connected to the removed negatives. It might be put better as "I never recognize 10% of the people", but a smaller number can make the problem seem smaller. This style of speech is apparently based on psychology more than on reason.