History

A big part of the problem is that despite the job being like 80% writing, many academics have no formal writing training. This is especially true in the sciences. You're just expected to pick it up by osmosis, and when most of the existing writing is shit, you're gonna pick up shit.

Jargon is often employed in the attempt to get published. Graduate students write the most papers and publications are how you get a job. Your publications will be reviewed by the most insufferable people that will give absurd feedback, so often the goal is to bamboozle them to make your work seem inscrutable. Sounding fancy and using the jargon of the trade is how you appear "serious" to the self-important assholes incompetently reviewing your work and nakedly asking you to cite their own lest they reject your paper.

Once a person gets their tenure-track job, one must basically become a self-promoting huckster to get funding and tenure. The kind of self-promoting huckster that expects the authors of papers they review to cite their own works to increase their own citation counts and prestige. And has a gigantic, yet fragile, ego.

Academia is broken due to its social relations to production, just like other jobs. There is basically no incentive to act reasonably outside of not lazily faking your data. Convincingly faking your data with cherry picking and bad analysis is the norm, though.

I want to say that this academic's writing style sucks. But who cares, she's just writing for her field.

People who write more pop stuff are just lazy and/or have lazy editors, so they have no excuse.