and seeing people talk about how they’ve never tried rice before having it at the restaurant
And this is the fundamental, absolute, no-further-down essential appeal of rationalism. Fans have never encountered ideas before, or not in any way that they’ve been able to digest them (“what the author really meant: the curtains are fucking blue”). And it bubbles up throughout, in every environ of the culture. If you are ever as stupid and masochistic as I am and find yourself on TheMotte.org, it’s the key to everything they say: they literally have never encountered facts from beyond their own rabid whirlpool of hatred, and everything that they learned in the whirlpool was laced with contrarian ressentiment towards an enemy they literally haven’t seen.
The Sequences are inherently short, there are just massively many of them - the fact that each one is woefully inadequate to its own aims is eclipsed by the size of the overall task.
The longer stuff, Siskind included, is precisely what you get from people with short attention spans who find it takes longer than that to justify the point that they want to make themselves. There’s no structure, no overarching thematic or compositional coherence to each piece, just the unfolding discovery that more points still need to be made. This makes it well-suited for limited readers who think their community’s style longform writing is special, but don’t trust it in authors who have worked on technique (literary technique is suspicious - splurging a first draft onto the internet marks the writer out as honest: rationalism is a 21st century romantic movement, not a scholastic one).
Besides which, the number of people who “read all of” any of these pieces is significantly lower than the number of people who did so.