"Not as an aesthetic choice. Not as nostalgia. But as a thinking tool" is a perfectly normal sentence, and I think there is an equally bad trend of people assuming things are AI written and forget that AI was trained on human writing. But to your point, agreed there is a disconnect when things are in fact written by AI, but I skimmed the article anyway so to me it didn't matter lol.

Those are sentence fragments, not perfect sentences. They're useful in some contexts, but are inappropriate for more formalized writing.

When LLMs reuse the same patterns dozens of times in a single article, the patterns stops being interesting or surprising and just become obnoxious and grating.