I do think there’s a bit more depth here.

One is that he worked as a middling chef for decades and only had his breakout success in his 40s. I think this made him much different than your generic essayist/journalist, and also let him speak to different kinds of people. He became a symbol that international travel, trying new things, and living life to its fullest doesn’t have to be an early 20s thing followed by decades of monotony.

He was also uniquely principled (he’d finance some episodes himself) and speak to people on all sides politically, without pandering to either.

That's true, and perhaps reflective of the fact that the modern essayist/journalist is one who has been solely an essayist/journalist in comparison, perhaps, to someone like George Orwell who was a policeman, dishwasher[1], and tutor among various other things.

I recall someone on the Internet[0] lamenting this change in writers in general, where their input material is other textual content and is not particularly influenced by a first-person encounter with reality. That's not guaranteed to produce a mushy result but often creates a work with an inauthenticity that disengages readers without an identical background.

Fair point on the other.

0: Perhaps classical oil-painter Kendric Tonn? Perhaps Paul Graham?

1: Amusingly, before his most famous works I'd read, as a young student, The Sporting Spirit (clever one), and Down and Out in Paris and London (more relevant to this conversation. A Western student would doubtless find it funny - since Orwell is best known here for 1984 and Animal Farm - that I didn't know he's The Dystopian Sci-Fi Guy