This essay is--oddly--both threadbare and meandering, and has turns of phrase that look like they were kept from an earlier, tighter version, such as the second sentence's "may have [...] but by".
I wonder if it's a generational thing, where now every essay must focus on one idea instead of taking a meandering path of curiosity to the author's final point.
I don't think it's even about staying on one topic. It's just that the topics were too broad for such a short essay, even had it been relatively dense, and then to that problem the author added long phrases where a short phrase would do, as if trying to pad the length to some predetermined mark.