Authors are often judged for their audience, not just their work. Have a "bad" audience, and the works are bad by association.

I suspect this is a motive behind a lot of unreadable prose among people who could do better. They don't want an unsophisticated audience to read it.

Conversely, this metonymy is also why I think a lot of books that have a self-improvement theme are sneered at irrespective of intellectual content. A book that just shares ideas, but without personal action (maybe just political action) attracts a different class of reader.

And maybe this isn't wrong? Certainly the value of a famous work isn't just reading it, but knowing that it has been understood by the culture and can stand-in as a symbol for certain views.

But, I suspect it reinforces some bad writing habits nonetheless.