Miscellaneous reactions, in an elegant bulleted list:
- "Simple" sentences are certainly expressive, but "elegant" wording expands the set of meanings that can be conveyed. And vice-versa
- I think a lot of the meat of a sentence is conveyed in the connotations of words and not their literal meaning. "Simple" wording is necessarily more common, and therefore will necessarily have a less specific or reliable connotation. This is a blessing and a curse.
- More subjectively, I think ideal writing is also a window into the author's experience of the world (or moreso whatever topic they're writing about), and as a reader, I want that to come through in an authentic way that matches the author's experience. So, using a thesaurus and agonizing over sentence structure might end up 'elegant' but still vaguely bad, but on the other hand if you agonize over a sentence and come up with something more "sophisticated" that ultimately rings truer to you, then go for it.
- ^ The above points aren't direct rebuttals to TFA, but I think they relate to why elegance can be appealing.