I guess scientists were never very good at communicating.
If they are editing their owns’ gibberish, that’s like the fox and the henhouse. Maybe they all think it makes sense.
I worked with an older man who truly wrote gibberish. I even wrote down a few examples in a notebook. Of “reports” and other documentation he made for the Navy. I had to edit and he was so bad I couldn’t even understand what he was getting at. This is not difficult language, either; nothing really “scientific”. Example:
“The following are baseline was used to generated for the attachment.”
Serious. From 1994. We were engineers.
Your colleague's writing reminds me of my students' writing. In the case of teenagers, I attribute it mostly to social promotion and lack of reading practice. Few of them read for pleasure and it shows. I don't know why an older man with an engineering education would be such a basket case. Perhaps he had an undiagnosed disability. Even my dad, who came to America as an adult and never had a formal course in English, writes better than that.