I’ve seen a lot of people on here be teased for difficulty expressing themselves. Either people complain “you’re using big person words to describe mundane things” when they’re aiming for precision or “woah, we don’t need that damn wall of text” when they’re aiming for clarity. It’s like people just want to complain.
I once read a 40 page article about laying undersea cables, in Wired, by Neal Stephenson. It was so engaging and I learned a lot. So for me, longer and written for layperson. Absolutely. Also I was quite surprised a magazine would give anyone that much space.