TLDR different people absorb and engage with information in different ways.

What is "word salad" for you, is a lyrical and motivated translation into humanist terms for the non-technical but well-educated reader with a different background, reading style, and perhaps, agenda.

The lyrical essay is a form of writing and argumentation with hundreds of years of literary history. It's not meant to be a man page.

For people rooted in this type of argumentation, fully-examined metaphor is what animates ideas and frames them in terms they can reason with.