I've seen surprising pushback from non-technical managers over tree-structured information -- we're talking something as simple as a three-level nested markdown

I've seen surprising pushback from non-technical managers over tree-structured information -- we're talking something as simple as a three-level nested markdown document. They'll say things like 'I can half understand it but my boss won't make the effort'. If you think about how much energy your brain takes to unpack paragraph text into information, tree-structure should be clearer because visual boundaries correspond to topic / semantic boundaries, i.e. the brain can offload some parsing to the highly-evolved retina. I don't have a good explanation for the preference for paragraph format in docs.