When I was young I loved magazines like Popular Electronics.

After getting my EE, I looked back at those magazines in my collection I immediately thought "That's so wrong!" or "That omits so/too much" or "I can't believe I thought this was electronics" or "Baby project! How lame!".

:-)

So it's very much about what can be absorbed and tailoring to the audience. You can't start with the math load that an EE student gets with a broad, general audience.

You see the opposite of this with academic papers - either the level of assumed audience is stratospheric OR it's clearly wording to keep the riff-raff out of the field. Mostly the former but sometimes the latter. You often also see this in STEM textbooks - the audience isn't even freshmen oriented!