Sort of related, I always felt the apparent level of writing was so much higher in say the Victorian age. If you look at text from then it feels quite sophisticated compared to what you’d typically see written even in a newspaper today.

I think this is because only an elite few were literate and even fewer were writing stuff. As literacy increased, the common denominator got lower.

The next step in this evolution appears to be LLM writing, people will look back on pre 2023 writing with the same feeling as we look at the later 19th century now.