Which is deeply ironic since a few years ago stilted prose would be unavoidable, whereas now it’s more often a result of the choice to not use an LLM to clean up your text.
Precisely! There are orders of magnitude more people who are poor English writers (by virtue of being ESL or merely not having the gift) than those gifted at English prose.
What we are seeing is not a decrease of quality writing but a compression of the large span of poor writing into a much more narrow mediocre range.
I disagree. To really produce maximally stilted prose, on has to have had exposure to much constrained and convoluted ramblings. Nothing says "nouns slogging native" like pomp.