I think I agree. I also think it’s weird to laud academic writing as it is often quite bad, having a tendency to go on and on with some pointless complexity (do you feel like a real academic when you write “not unreasonable”? I claim that ordinarily the only nuance between this and “reasonable” is that writing one makes you feel clever).

Historically academic writing has been constrained by page limits (compare papers written by Euler to Gauss). But as publishing has moved online and expensive this has become less of an issue. And if you wrote a book there were far fewer constraints on length.