This aligns with my experience, but my experience also includes “ugh, this is slop” reactions to writing composed a decade or more ago. (Professionally written midbrow nonfiction is the most vulnerable.) So I wouldn’t dismiss hypothesis 3 out of hand at least as a component; there’s a lot of previous standard “good prose” moves, such as tricolon, that now read as yucky.
This aligns with my experience, but my experience also includes “ugh, this is slop” reactions to writing composed a decade or more ago. (Professionally written midbrow nonfiction is the most vulnerable.) So I wouldn’t dismiss hypothesis 3 out of hand at least as a component; there’s a lot of previous standard “good prose” moves, such as tricolon, that now read as yucky.
Interesting! If you come across any such examples, I’d be very curious to see them.