I'm certainly showing my age, but
despite it being an interesting topic I really struggled with the English style in the piece.
So for example, rather than succintly stating: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog", this author adopts the style more akin to: "The quick brown fox, which grew up Oakville near the rushing river, jumped, or, leaped mightily, over the lazy dog rather than simply walking around the dog like most would do normally".
Similar to Blaise Pascal's sentiment: 'I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.'
Indeed, Thomas Jefferson writes about this skill: “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
As a counter, readers of this board love some Tolkien, yet that writing goes on and on and on and on with so much extra text
This describes the majority of all literature, works of the written word, and perhaps human communication in general. For Tolkien, it could be argued that the whole purpose of his books is to entertain with the medium of language, so all that "extra text" is not extra at all, since they're all supposed to be there to be appreciated and enjoyed. If you took away the "extra", there would be no literature there, just a plot summary.
It wasn't just extra prose. I found it genuinely difficult to read.