As a side note, there is definitely a trend in certain French academic circles consisting of using a hard-to-digest style (needlessly complex sentence structure

As a side note, there is definitely a trend in certain French academic circles consisting of using a hard-to-digest style (needlessly complex sentence structures, semi-obscure words where a more common one would have been just as good or better) to express not particularly complex. I suspect that they have a running "most over-the-top sentence" [1] contest. 1: technically known in French as "phrase la plus ampoulée", which "over-the-top" doesn't really translate correctly