I'm not going to say that there's isn't plenty of obscurantism, needless jargon, and just plain bad writing in academia. But, this article paints a pretty simplistic and one-sided picture. Let me take a quote that's emblematic of the problem from one of the professors (!?) in the article: “Academics, in general, don’t think about the public; they don't think about the average person, and they don't even think about their students when they write,”[Deborah S. Bosley] says. “Their intended audience is always their peers. That’s who they have to impress to get tenure.”

Specifically this notion that "[an academic writer's] intended audience is always their peers," is treated as though it's somehow incriminating. But it's not, it's what most academic writing is for! Many academics do write for the public—and that's great, and more should do so—but they don't publish that in journals or with an academic press and when they do write for the public, their writing is usually pitched at a more accessible level. But most of the writing academics do is aimed at their peers because that is how ideas are transmitted among specialists and how a body of knowledge is gradually expanded. The notion that that they only do this just to "impress" or get tenure seems to be a really bad-faith argument.

Look, any highly technical endeavor is going to have highly technical jargon that’s pretty impenetrable from the outside. There's nothing wrong with that: it allows specialists to communicate about complex topics efficiently. Whether the field is medicine, philosophy, or computer science is immaterial. Frankly, if you want to see a place where obscurantism, needless jargon, and just plain bad writing are used as tools to disguise the fundamental banality of the ideas being presented, look no further than a lot of business writing. I'd take academic writing over management-speak any day.