What I'm reading in the parent post is an assertion that any verbosity that's simply replacing a word with a weird symbol (that's going to be spoken or thought

What I'm reading in the parent post is an assertion that any verbosity that's simply replacing a word with a weird symbol (that's going to be spoken or thought of as a word anyway) is not true verbosity but just an illusion of it. Some languages express the same thing with more or less concepts, and more or less explicit complexity, and that is a true difference in verbosity, but symbol-vs-word is just a superficial difference that can and should be ignored for a useful comparison.