It's not just local context. Reading a dense book is still more difficult than reading a less dense book, given a fairly similar amount of information and style in conveying that information. Larger codebases suffer the same problem you mention in a different way, and cargocults in most static languages tend to advocate very verbose writing styles.

Where this falls apart, the more verbose writing style hasn't been proven to convey more information or in a better way. That's an assumption still tossed around.