> education is not storytelling 

I actually disagree. We're humans and we love stories. They keep is engaged and are a good way to compact information. But it also is highly dependent on how it is done. Truth be told, we're constantly telling stories and I think part of the problem is not being cognizant of this.

  > People want to save "twists" and "revelations" for maximum impact and it's harmful.

Maybe I'm misreading you. "Plot twists" would certainly be the wrong implementation. But when teaching one of my goals is to get students to be trying to ask a question that I'm about to answer. That's the story part. I'm leading them down the path and they should have suspicions about what lies around the next corner.

So basically a goal is that I'll stop for questions at some point and if I'm successful there'll be a student that asks a question we've been building up to and that I'm about to ask and/or answer. But there shouldn't be a "plot twist". I'm not trying to surprise students (usually :), but rather the story should make sense. As an educator[0] my goal is to get students to remember certain things and ask the right questions (a skill that's non-obvious yet people are overly confident about their level).

A good example of story driven writing is Cropper's The Quantum Physicists: And an Introduction to Their Physics. I really enjoyed this in my undergrad because it not only taught the physics but taught it in a historical manner. I said there's compression in story telling and this style of teaching did a great job at motivation of why these physicists were asking these questions. It gave context. I honestly think it had a big impact on me and helped push me into research (I do ML, not physics).

Certainly there's a time and place for being terse and hyper fixated on the information you're trying to teach but often we're trying to do a lot more than that.

FWIW, I think LLMs are terrible at this. They make everything seem "exciting". When everything is "load bearing" then nothing is. They're really bad at the context and understanding the bigger picture. They're especially terrible at responding to a question with something like "keep that question in mind, we'll come back to it in next week's lecture"

[0] I'm currently in industry

[1] https://archive.org/details/bwb_S0-BVP-068