Sure, it's all for ensuring we are understood better among ourselves, but I wonder if writing this way makes us cognitively simpler.
"unnecessary verbosity" is just one way to express your position in the society. Wearing impractical clothes, complex etiquette, having pale skin and speaking in certain manner was something that requires either wealth or practise.
Today business jargon combined with clothes and behaviour still work today as signalling your identity. So is wearing hoodie and saying "bro" constantly. People learn to feel comfortable in the uniform and in the language they identify with.
> "Consider the leisurely style of British correspondent William Howard Russell in his coverage of the Battle of Balaklava in 1854.
If the exhibition
of the most brilliant valor,
of the excess of courage, and
of a daring
which would have reflected luster
on the best days of chivalry
can afford full consolation
for the disaster of today,
we can have no reason
to regret the melancholy loss
which we sustained
in a contest
with a savage and barbarian enemy.
It's not that the style was unknown (Tacitus' prose was flattened compared with Cicero's) but that it wasn't expected in asynchronous long-form writing. In a different genre, compare Cooke's easily tweetable summary of Custer's 1876 command:
> "Benteen. Come On. Big Village. Be Quick. Bring Packs. P.S. Bring Packs."
If an idea can be expressed in the same way with "Plain English", how would this make people 'congnitively simpler'?
One notes that even in letters sent home from American and Western European wars in the 19th century, the common soldiers who wrote those letters often used much more elaborate sentence structures than today, even though they were from the peasantry and had not received more than a rudimentary schooling.