This is not what the OP is suggesting. He's paraphrasing a well-established usability guideline [1] to use text that has a readability score of 5th grade or lower, because people are in a hurry and they don't read text on the web, they scan it. Using more complex sentence structures in this context only leads to misreadings and misunderstandings.

[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/

(I am assuming that no-one thinks that Japanese consumers read security filings before making their weekly shop?)

dreaming of some alternate reality where GUIs were never invented

This is the ideal dream state you send your students to absorb? A bunch of terminal-users obsessed with building everything in the terminal? Why indoctrinate your students into that?

Note: Reading over the above I realize it sounds antagonistic, probably because I formed everything as a question. I don't mean it to be antagonistic. It's just me not understanding where you're coming from.

if we stopped treating our users like 12 year olds would they stop interacting with our sites like 12 year olds

Yeah, maybe. But... I'm not sure if you want my dad to be part of your idealized future, but if you do, the terminal is not going to be the way to do it

I'm all for finding ways to empower users, but how does that lead to you getting off the train at no GUIs, instead of better GUIs?

MUDs were before my time, but I have a friend that claims to have spent hundreds of hours playing these text-based games.

Addiction is a human issue and isn't limited to one form or another.

> Addiction is a human issue and isn't limited to one form or another.

For me it was newsgroups. (Sure, I read them in a Windows-based Usenet reader, but it was the contents that were addictive, and that was all text.)