"Tribological behavior and wear mechanism of Ti/MoS2 films deposited on plasma nitrided CF170 steel sliding against different mating materials"

"Which Milky Way masses are consistent with the slightly declining 5-25 kpc rotation curve?"

"Characterization of systematic error in Advanced LIGO calibration in the second half of O3"

Randomly found on arXiv and ADS. I'm not seeing a lot of pretention, dishonesty or imprecision.

I don't think paper titles are usually pretentious, they're just dense with jargon to be terse. They're impenetrable if you don't know the jargon, but I don't agree that makes it pretentious. I don't think it's possible for a journal paper in an established field to be simultaneously precise, accessible, and unprecedented enough to be worth publishing.

Try read Robinson Crusoe. The chapters titles are like "A ship comes to the rescue - X, Y and Z also happens".

E.g.

"Chapter XXVI Robinson Discovers Himself to the English Captain--Assists Him in Reducing His Mutinous Crew, Who Submit to Him"

A massive proportion of all titles were this way. Take a look at fictional novels or political pamphlets some time. They're just three sentence long summaries and they're all delightful.

It is easy to when there are fewer academics around. Higher education was a privilege, tenureship was not yet much of a thing.

I think the exact opposite, its unnecessarily embellished and ornate. Makes the whole thing sound so whimsical as to not be worth reading. I don't need a fairytale title to be interested in the content.