They do not say it was hard. There is a difference between being hard and requiring 0.5 second more of thinking, which can and does disrupt the reading flow.
Exactly this. I actually think it’s exactly the opposite of assuming your audience is a stupid: it’s respecting them enough to do the work yourself instead of offloading to them. I’ll die on the hill that 19th century referring to the 1800s is fundamentally unintuitive.
