Can disc herniation cause that kind of pain? Absolutely.

Hopefully your surgeon recommended microdiscectomy - removal of the offending disc via minimally invasive approach.

If you have some arthritis there too, it'll cause bone growth where you don't want it and possibly impinge on the nerve roots. That's one of the things most people don't understand about arthritis (technically degenerative joint disease excluding rheumatoid arthritis) - DJD bone grows where you don't want it and causes problems when it gets into sensitive/painful nerve areas.

So typically a surgeon will do a laminectomy - scraping out the arch of the vertebra of excess bone growth - to allow free spinal movement without impinging on anything - at the time of discectomy if needed.

And here's where we get into one of the really fuzzy areas in science. Any time you do a laminectomy, you risk developing scar tissue just because of the surgery, the resulting insult to the structures involved, and the healing process involved. So just doing any invasive surgery carries the risk of scar tissue causing more problems than the original problem. There is even a condition called postlaminectomy syndrome where so much scar tissue has built up that the spine is really not very functional at this point, and there's not much science can do because further surgery to break up the scar tissue only makes it worse.

So I would be OK with microdiscectomy and +/- on laminectomy for the reasons mentioned above. Minimally invasive laminectomy is less injurious than open (i.e., wide incision) discectomy, but technically more difficult for the surgeon.

This is why a conservative approach is usually the best first option. Start right into surgery without exploring conservative options first, and you open yourself up to the possibility of the surgery doing more harm than good. Correct one problem but cause another.