You clearly aren’t terribly literate then given Faulkner, Dickens, or even Linco

You clearly aren’t terribly literate then given Faulkner, Dickens, or even Lincoln. Sentences place a burden on working memory, and working memory is a fair proxy for intelligence. One of the reasons to write in operational prose in long sentences is to state something meaningful that only capable people can understand, and in doing so filter out the ‘comments by the unwashed masses’ so to speak. The demand for short sentences is a postwar phenom, due to the military discovery of the practical illiteracy of the people, and the desire to sell newspapers to the working and laboring (lower) classes, in order to promote political agendas via them. Schools have dumbed down education severely over the decades. But then we are losing more than 1 point of IQ per decade and at the present rate will turn into a second world population within 25 years, and a third world population by the end of the century. History will ironically note that the great tragedy of the 20th was not the world wars themselves but the mistaken postwar anti-darwinian movement that reversed the prewar investment in soft eugeics. (if that doesn’t burn you up I don’t know what will).