I can confidently say that, yes, reading helps a lot. My mental model has shifted a bit that words are cheap (printing -> writing -> typing -> generating) and that we should accept there is something like high quality text.

I haven't really been a reader, but I can definitely notice when a book/text is "hard". I'm currently reading the old testament, and I understand very little (even the oxford one that has a lot of annotations is hard for me). I like this, because its a measurement of what I don't know (if that makes sense).