I find this statement very offensive. Papers like this exist to update people on the state of the art in their field (a target audience of rarely more than 100k

I find this statement very offensive. Papers like this exist to update people on the state of the art in their field (a target audience of rarely more than 100k people in the whole world). As others have mentioned already, there are great review articles, specifically meant for people just entering the field, and even they require quite a bit of dedication for a layperson to understand. Or to phrase it in a different way: how often do emails on the dev mailing lists of open source project include a detailed description of the project that would be enough to bring laypeople up-to-speed.