Why does removing "a", "the", and "I'd be happy to" not damage comprehension? The answer lies in how information is structured in English prose versus how the brain actually processes technical content.
The Linguistics
Cognitive linguists distinguish between informationally dense content and discourse markers. Discourse markers — articles, hedges, phatic expressions — exist to smooth social interaction in speech. In written technical contexts, they are vestigial.
When you read "The variable is being reassigned on each render" vs "Variable reassigned each render", the second triggers identical semantic processing. The definite article adds zero information.
Why LLMs Default to Verbose
Models are trained on human text. Human text is socially lubricating by default. "I'd be happy to help" is rewarded in RLHF because humans rate it as "friendly". Caveman mode is a simple constraint that overrides this default without touching the model weights.