I suspect it's the consequence of a depth-first search for truth, when reality is deep.

Imho narrative and metaphor and feeling hits more like the breadth-first mode. Lots of compression in pursuit of demarking a reality, whether or not everyone likes where a story does its compression. It takes visiting a lot places (and listening to how lot of signals bounce back) to drop a good metaphor, or craft a good story, that reaches and affects a large quorum of minds.

Because they know that quantity is a substitute for quality. If you write enough words about something, no matter how nonsensical your actual arguments are, people tend to assume you know what you are talking about. If someone points out a flaw in one of your arguments you just say "well you aren't addressing all my other arguments"

It's gish gallop