Academic writing has a lot of problems, but I'm always struck by the regular complaints about vocabulary. Sometimes people use a fancy word when a simple one would be better, but we don't need to apologize for precise language. We do need to apologize for terrible sentences.

You can look up a new word in a dictionary, or you can learn what it means through context, so eventually something like "habitus" or "network effect" reads like "habits" or "connections," though with subtle and important distinctions. A clunky sentence will always be clunky.

This is the main problem I have with so much advice about making academic writing clear. "Language people understand" is only partially about vocabulary. I think the much more important problem is style, and at every level: from sentence and paragraph up to article and chapter.

I've seen many academic arguments that are impossible to follow even though they use "regular words." There's a lot of talk about how some academics use big words to hide confused thinking, but I think that kind of obfuscation is more true of style than it is of word choice.

Good writing is hard. It takes many rewrites to figure out what you really think, and it takes even more rewrites to figure out what you think but don't have space, here, to say. It takes rewrites to make sure sentence order and paragraph order work and all sorts of other things.

Modeling and mentoring that kind of good writing is something some academics really emphasize, people like @JessicaCalarco among others. But it's not at all incentivized. And if your writing is too clean, you can be told it's "too journalistic," whatever that means.