Ah, a fellow economist lol. Lack of clarity is a strategic advantage because (1) (as you said) it looks impressive and (2) it's hard to validate that it's correct.
So many papers contain such elementary statistics mistakes such as survivorship bias, e.g. 'returns to education' is almost exclusively measured by asking individuals who graduated (on average 50% of enrolled students don't) and respond back to surveys (good chance of bias).
Pubs are how you get jobs. It's not about science anymore, it's about navigating bureaucracy for an elite job.
Reminds me of the old "there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
I'm thinking about the success of Freakonomics, Thinking Fast and Slow, The Elegant Universe, etc. These are all academics, who've "translated" their research for the masses. That translation ended up being much more impactful - and prestigious - than an intimidating paper.
I hope this becomes more of a trend, and an incentive structure, in the future.
To make matters worse, this is an evolved trait: researchers whose papers are intimidating are more likely to succeed, which means they're more likely to have future PhD students, which means that the style of writing is more likely to get passed on.
I think the main way to address this is to change the incentives. In particular, by creating publication venues that value simplicity and clarity (one such conference is SOSA, which has had a lot of impact on theoretical computer science in the last few years).