If anything is shocking it is how modern readers have to be spoon fed bullet points and can't handle the slightest complexity of composition.

It might be that modern readers have other things they can read/do with their time. In pre internet times it wasn't so much the case - you'd buy a mag or book and then read it but now there are many alternatives a click away.

Pros and cons but often in the old days it was spun out to fill some volume the the printing press was set for like 400 pages in a book. I did Great Expectations at school which had about ten chapters with the main story and then about 60 chapters of irrelevant stuff because Dickens was paid weekly by the chapter.