I was under the impression it was a deliberate decision, as the aphorism of Empedocles goes:

What needs saying needs saying twice

Related is what Horace wrote
 

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure

Now in case you didn't realize I'm going meta, by repeating similar sentiments over and over. So I'll refer to Professor of Negotiation Strategy Deepak Malhotra who advises would be negotiators:
 

Don't leave it to chance that they interpret what you're saying

Pithy, concise, brief statements lack context. This increases the chances they will be misinterpreted. Consistent misinterpretation is not optimal. You can remedy this, as Eliezer does by repetition, stating the same thing over and over again. You can give multiple examples of the same sentiment with slight variations. Each adds more context and narrows the band of possible interpretations.

This is not a matter of Kolmogorov complexity. The issue isn't whether it can be compressed and recreated by a theoretically optimal un-compressing machine. The audience is not a theoretically optimal un-compressor.

Have you ever been misinterpreted? How did you deal with it? If you were discussing a topic you thought was extremely important and for which interpretations that veered from your intentions could be very counter-productive, would you try to be as pithy and concise as possible or would you try to minimize and narrow the possible misinterpretations? How would you do that?

I think for a certain time and demographic (which included me then), the wordiness and imagery actually helped. But we were all younger then, maybe smarter, and definitely more open. It doesn't work as much on me now.

Anyway, I'm not sure it needs to be rewritten today. The threat has become easier to see. Lots of people already ask themselves what jobs they'll have, what skills children should learn, how most people will live - given that we already treat our poor and homeless pretty badly. It's not the whole threat, but it's a lower bound threat that feels alarming enough.

I think your assessment may be largely correct but I do think it's worth considering how things are not always nicely compressible.

I'll try to respect your preference for brevity ;)

• a shorter version would be very useful -- yes, fully agree
  • at least there is readthesequences.com without the comments (10x as much text as the articles)
  • there were summaries at LW wiki, but those were too short; we need something medium-sized
• there are some good reasons why Eliezer wrote a long text
  • there wasn't rationalist community yet, lines had to be drawn to separate it from many existing adjacent communities (atheists, skeptics, libertarians, sci-fi fans, self-help, contrarians, academia...)
  • emotional, near-mode appeal -- why should we even care about "being rational"?
  • popular bad memes/patterns (mysterious answers, applause lights, "trust the science"...)

tl;dr -- writing for an already existing rationalist(-ish) community is different from writing in order to create a rationalist community

I'm in the process of turning the ideas in a stack of my notebooks into what I hope will be a short paper, which is just one illustration of what I think was the real trade-off, which is between conciseness and time spent writing. Or for another, see the polished 20-page papers on logical decision theory. Though it's not the same, they cover much of the same ground as the older expositions of timeless decision theory and updateless decision theory. There was a long period where these kinds of decision theories were only available through posts, and then through Eliezer Yudkowsky's long TDT paper. That period could not have been skipped, and could only have been shortened in the sense that the same work could have been done faster at the expense of other work. See also this exchange on Twitter, though they're not talking about being concise specifically:

Miles Brundage: I can’t speak to the details of those experiments but I at least read a much higher fraction of your paper outputs than your blog post outputs. Possibly I’m a minority here but I am certainly not the only one.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Yeah, I tried it and it was way too fucking time-expensive. My guess is that 100x the output you like less ends up having the larger impact on the world.

This is another example of Elezier Yudkowsky not being aware of his low information density having a bad influence on his theories reaching a broader audience:

https://youtube.com/shorts/v5GYeKg4YRE?si=KwSairgyr1N7p497