Top-40 audio engineers are not wrong. Just as you wouldn't format long walls of text and single short phrases the same way in typography, you wouldn't mix these two the same way.
Topic drift: I hammer on my students that contracts are much more readable if done in short, single-subject paragraphs without long wall-of-words passages.
Don't lawyers have effective ways to include and reference things, create standard definitions and procedures without pasting the same stuff everywhere?
In some fields, yes — but as a class, lawyers: (A) notoriously prefer reinventing the wheel, and (B) sometimes could be suspected of hoping that the MEGO Factor — Mine Eyes Glaze Over — will cause the other side's contract-draft reviewer to overlook something that the drafter buried in a long, wall-of-words provision. I see that happen pretty regularly.
(In the 1990s I initiated and headed up a project for the American Bar Association Section of IP Law to try to standardize the wording of various building-block clauses for software license agreements. [0] The chief IP counsel of a Fortune X company [X being a very-low number], whom I knew pretty well from the Section, said he was opposed to having any kind of standardized language because, he said (paraphrasing), "I want to be free to be an asshole.")
[0] https://www.oncontracts.com/docs/Rutgers-MSLP-Precursor-to-G...
I no longer work in law ;)
That could actually turn out to be worse. Take a look at a lot of federal bills. They're written like:
'In 8 USC 552(b)(ii) strike the word "foo" and insert "bar baz"'
You then have to go cross reference everything for every line. It's a nightmare. If the bill was written in a computer readable diff format instead, that could be better.
From the oleaginous Francis Urquhart in the wonderful original (British) version of House of Cards: "You might think that. I couldn't possibly comment." [0]