He takes too long to push the informative points, all the while cloaking them in too much empty dross.
At first, I thought this was an example of something written by an AI program. It is lumpy and disjointed to the mind in the same way that the Uncanny Valley is disorienting to the eye.
I'm going to settle on it simply being a poorly written meandering of thought disguised as something that it isn't.
I hate to explain something someone else wrote, but the messy, tangential writing is mirroring the uncertainty that the author calls out in the dictionary definitions that they love. Their intent is to convey the joy that these words have for them when seen through the lens of Webster’s 1913. Joy is not constrained to declarative statements marching in lock step to the beat of logical coherence. To remove the “over wordiness” and “needless punctuation” is to lose the human aspect of the post.
Sometimes conveying information is a secondary or tertiary purpose to a piece of prose.
Also, not everyone is Raymond Carver. Some people are Henry James.
Made my day.