Your argument is that lots of experts on remotely operated vehicles would scoff at the article because it didn't use their "inside" jargon? First off, how many people would that be, compared to the number of people who love a good mystery and a good gadget, but have no idea what an ROV is?
As to bandwidth, you only have to spell it out once. Simple practice: I built a remotely-operated vehicle (ROV) and solved some cold missing person cases.
The author of this piece doesn't strike me as someone who relishes communicating in cryptic acronyms, so my guess is that it was just thoughtless. He hadn't yet seen my screed on the subject. :-)
I'm sure there are those who love communicating in cryptic code. They tend to congregate in like-minded cliques that don't much care about communicating outside their tightly-defined world. So be it. But if you want to be read and understood by a wide audience, spell it out.
The proper comparison isn't the author's time versus the readers looking it up, but rather readers encountering a term for the first time having to look it up versus every other reader having to read overly verbose writing that reiterates basic definitions rather than getting to the novel points. If you're as interested in ROVs as you imply, well now you know for all of the other times you will read the term. If you're really expecting to never encounter the term again, I wonder why you're reading a technical engineering-adjacent forum.
And yes, effective communication within "like-minded cliques" is exactly what is facilitated by jargon. Personally I'd rather read concise technical descriptions from such direct communications (doing the work to learn what I don't know from context or external sources), rather than having to skim through watered-down general-audience "edutainment" articles and read between the lines to figure out the specific touchstones being referenced by canned general phrases.
This isn't a water hobbyists forum, nor one for all manner of remotely operated vehicles, so it's a bit optimistic to assume many people here will know "ROV" as a remote controlled submarine. Fact is, most of us cannot, from the title, figure out if we're interested, nor from skimming the first six (!) pages of a long article. Explaining ROV once at the beginning would, I dare say, not have impacted the enjoyment of underwater professionals very much, but saved me and most others on this forum some time figuring out if I want to figure it out.
And the article was not written to this forum?
> Fact is, most of us cannot, from the title, figure out if we're interested
This is a situation where HN’s “no editorialising titles” rule falls flat. Simply with the context change the title would be also best changed. I also understand why we have the rule of course.
> Explaining ROV once at the beginning would, I dare say, not have impacted the enjoyment of underwater professionals very much
Sure. There is a lot which could have been improved on the whole article with better editing.