Academic documents, as I interpret them, aim to be acceptable to the academic community or considered academic.
There are good non-signaling reasons for academic documents being the way that they are. Consider the following properties of academia:
A field is huge, such that it is very hard to learn all of it
The group of people working on the field is enormous, requiring decentralized coordination
Fields of inquiry take decades, meaning that there needs to be a way of onboarding new people
Consider how you might try to write explanatory posts for such a group that are shorter than books, and I suspect you’ll recover many of the properties of academic articles (perhaps modernized, e.g. links instead of citations).
There are good non-signaling reasons for academic documents being the way that they are. Consider the following properties of academia:
A field is huge, such that it is very hard to learn all of it
The group of people working on the field is enormous, requiring decentralized coordination
Fields of inquiry take decades, meaning that there needs to be a way of onboarding new people
Consider how you might try to write explanatory posts for such a group that are shorter than books, and I suspect you’ll recover many of the properties of academic articles (perhaps modernized, e.g. links instead of citations).