I've been thinking about @philosopher70 's Half Hour Hegel lectures recently (as watching last few months),

and how they show that online teaching can mean managing cognitive load without dumbing anything down (something both Sadler and Hegel are very committed to not doing.)

Generally my advice (and that of the pedagogues with the brain scanners and so on) is to only lecture for 5-10 minutes at a time and to have exercises interspersed, so that you move the things you've just put in someone's short term/working memory into their long term memory.

Sadler doesn't make his lectures this short, of course - but he does get the idea of limiting lecture time to give people only so much to process at once. I also like how he tells people not to listen to these right in a row so they have time to process.

Moreover: within these lectures, there really is example or challenge to the audience to think something through every 5-10 minutes. I don't know if this is because he explicitly read learning theory or intuited it, but it's right on point in this way.

When I teach about cognitive load to my learning design students, I always emphasise that I am not telling them to dumb things down when e.g. they put classes online.

They should instead focus on cutting extraneous details from their lectures to focus their material, and helping students apply and analyse what's being presented to them.

In fact part of good learning design is to keep the difficulty - you can help people move things to their long term memory (and to what Hegel might call their "understanding" by creating what designers sometimes call "desirable difficulty" - just the right amount of challenge.

As teachers/facilitators we can challenge students to incorporate new ideas into a system as we speak, thus both

helping move things to their long term memory so as to manage cognitive load & the overwhelm they may feel online
AND
helping build systematic knowledge and thought

TL;DR you can design to help with cognitive overload without dumbing down. And you can probably even do it in a way that Hegel would approve of.

-
(sorry for typos throughout!)

Addendum, I think that the fact that communication (from news to social media) now increasingly happens in online platforms means there is structural e.g. built-in pressure from design to prevent cognitive overload by making everything short & sweet and soundbitey and clickbaity.

UX designers for e.g. websites are trained in this, especially to make online sales happen. What started as UX design becomes the way news is written and algorithms reward things....

But to be a really excellent (and I would argue politically conscious) designer one has to try to limit cognitive load in a very different way-by drawing subjects in to something long rather than short and complex rather than simple...

by having them slowly build up their knowledge systematically, so that yes, their working memory is never overwhelmed, but equally their long term "memory" or understanding becomes increasingly sophisticated, varied, systematic, and critical.

And so they grow more curious over time, not just stuck in loops of drive as @Jodi7768 puts it.