[gavinray]

Why does it seem common for people to knock modifiers for degree/intensity with words.

The statements "That's nice." and "That's really, truly nice." give off very different messages.

One of them I'm not even sure if you're being short or dismissive/not interested, and I have to do mental gymnastics to figure out what the underlying tone is.

Just one or two words makes a massive (see what I did there) difference in tone + perception.

This is half the reason why it's hard working remotely. I put so much effort into being overly polite/nice with tone because you lose out on all other social cues and it's easy to mistake an ambiguous message.