I think this is due to lazy prompting. It isn’t hard to get an LLM to write concisely, with a logical flow and to be direct with the point you want made. I’d rather read something an LLM has written in this manner than a lot of things I come across written by humans.

Regarding padding out word counts, I see this more often in newspapers and magazines than I do in AI-land. It’s like Netflix shows trying to meet an 8 or 10 episode minimum - horribly boring with unnecessary filler.