The message is fair and valid, and seemingly true, but cripes, that's some thick reading unless you are literally a scholar. Dial it back. Talk about never use 5 words when an opaque and obscure reference will do.

I'd rather view it as a celebration of good diction, and vocabulary, and the expressiveness of the English language. Maybe some of the literary references are obscure, and most escaped my own knowledge of the literature, but it seems apt to revel in the art of good writing and hold one's self to a higher standard in a piece about literature and written media and books.

Writing for the lowest common denominator is very much characteristic of modern social media and the Internet, where long-form content gives way to shorts and soundbytes and Tweets, and much content is tailored to the algorithm, serving its whims and desires, instead of those of the author and perhaps even the audience. This is what is meant by the character of the medium tinting the messages it carries a shade of digital sepiatone, all the subtleties and nuances of hue lost to oversimplified palettes and cut to 15 seconds before your attention is whisked away by the next item in your feed, or notification sitting in your dock.

Literate content can exist on the Internet but its form will be dictated and constrained by the pressures of the medium, and it's refreshing to see content try to push back against the walls of the medium by resisting the urge to oversimplify.

Also it's kind of hard to find definite statements to agree or disagree with. I mean it's all like "the arc of the moral universe had turned in part because of the supposedly liberatory power of technology". What does that actually mean? What is the arc of the moral universe? Which way did it turn? I wasn't aware it actually had an arc.

Essays have traditionally been discursive, referential, and elaborate. The genre is not intended to be a pragmatic information dump digested in the shortest possible time, but an occasion for laying out an argument while taking pleasure in possibilities of English prose.

I don't think so, I suspect that this is standard fare for the audience of a website called 'lithub.' In the words of gamers: git gud, scrub. (<- light hearted jab)

I can’t help but imagine some of the folks this message is referring to as “needing to read more” seeing this and dismissing it as using language of “the elites”. There’s a certain irony to it, although the message is a good one.

Which of those references are obscure?

I put random paragraphs into a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level assessment calculator, which suggests the US school grade level required to understand the assessed text. It consistently returned between Grade 8 and 9.

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It's for people that read books and have done so for a long time. That's all it takes to appreciate it, you really don't need to be a scholar.