did the author oversleep the past several centuries?
as for the rest of it, the current crop of LLMs are bad at writing because of ~~brainwashing~~ alignment and the vast amount of ESL-written assistant exchanges being heavily prioritized during training. when you interact with a corporate model via its default chat interface, without a jailbreak and a generous prefill, you interact with the equivalent of a HR lady who takes her DEI training super seriously. the Chinese models train heavily on the slop produced by GPT/Claude/Gemini, so they exhibit similar behavior. it was particularly noticeable with original llama, whose base models were much more human compared to the finetunes, which were heavily tainted with GPT slop.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that LLMs are not inherently incapable of writing well. a model trained only on high-quality human data and without safety/alignment brainwash will be far, far more capable than the current ones.