I see this often as a criticism of legal writing as well, and while some of it is legitimate, there's also an element of academic writing having a specific purp

I see this often as a criticism of legal writing as well, and while some of it is legitimate, there's also an element of academic writing having a specific purpose. And that purpose isn't entertainment or pleasantness - it's precision. Like recently, when I had a sentence using the phase "missing completely at random" and someone deleted "completely" for clarity. That word was there for a very specific purpose - "missing completely at random" and "missing at random" mean different things.