>Historically, these texts were often consumed (especially in formal or semi-formal settings) by either having them read aloud for you or reading them aloud yourself.

In the middle ages this was true, mostly because few people were literate at all and the words didnt have spaces between them. The ability to read silently was regarded as impressive.

By 1911 reading silently to yourself was the expectation of a normal literate adult. Only hillbillies and their ilk could not.

This is a simple text, intended to be legible even to school children of the era. It's also very structured already.

Their contemporary English was a bit different, but not so far removed that you should need assistance.

It was very much the norm in formal and semi-formal gatherings. They didn't have conference talks with PowerPoint slide decks, their own equivalent was to read out articles or papers. This often extended to university-level lectures, in a practice that was arguably carried over from the middle ages as you mention, but was very much still in use.

> It's also very structured already.

It's definitely not very structured by modern standards. The length of paragraphs alone would be described as "wall of text". Again, this was an ordinary practice back in the day, aimed at saving costly paper and reducing the manual effort involved in physically laying out the work on the page. It was far from exceptional: to a first approximation, most texts from the early 20th c. or before will look like that.