The LaTeX community is using a certain sort of typographic style for creating academic journals and books. This style is codified in the TeX engine itself and it is explained in online forums how to use the software. The open question until now was the reason why this style is applied.
The assumption is, that even the LaTeX community itself doesn't know why they are formatting pdf documents in a certain way. The only thing what is for sure is, that a LaTeX generated paper looks very different from a Word generated document. There is a single working thesis available why LaTeX documents are looking all the same. In a single sentence it is about creating long winded text which creates a typographic dessert.
Let us describe the situation from a birds eye perspective and ignore the LaTeX ecosystem including the underlying algorithms. Suppose the idea is to format the text in the most boring fashion. The text should look like monoculture in agriculture. There is no structure available but all the textlines, characters and paragraphs are looking the same. That means, the size is the same, the textline width is the same and very important there are no images and subsections. It is a simply an endless amount of characters without any orientation. The reader won't see a starting point and he hardly find any lighthouse. Of course, such a text is unreadable, it has much in common how newspapers were looking until the 1970s. During that period it was technically not possible to use pictures and even tables were not available. Instead, the article in a newspaper was a long homogeneous text block.
With this requirement in mind the text logical step is to investigate different options how to create such a document with a computer. One option is the MS Word program the much better alternative is the LaTeX engine. Both programs are able to create an image free, justified text without any subsections. The reader will loose the orientation for sure but there is only an endless amount of text in a tiny font. There is no visible structure because a single paragraph occupies multiple pages. In other words, such a text is the opposite of an easy to read document.
The surprising situation is, that such an antipattern in typography is exactly the same what LaTeX is trying to archive. The goal is, that the text is hard to read. The internal algorithms in TeX which are equal to typography are trying to emphasize a situation in which the reader is lost in the text. The goal is not to provide waypoints and a structure but the opposite is the case. That means, everything looks the same. The meaning of a text isn't provided by its visual appetence but only by the words itself. Without reading the text, a fictional book and a non fictional academic text are looking the same. if the text was written mirrored it is impossible to guess what is written in the book.
LaTeX is working with some sophisticated algorithm for paragraph justification, and adjusting the white spaces. These algorithms have a simple purpose. They are reducing any visible structure. The goal is, that every line looks the same, and that the resulting text is hard to read. The eye has no visible anchor points. There are no subsections, there are no images and at the end of a line there is no white space. In contrast, the text will look like an endless ocean of characters which are forming words never seen before.
There is a possible explanation available why this unusual formatting structure makes sense. The reason is, that a book is different from a comic book and it is different from a Television show. A book is by definition equal to text. Typography is not about increasing the amount of pictures in a book but it is about making the text look like a dessert. A book has to confuse the reader by presenting him endless amount of pages which are looking all the same.
There is no need to utilize LaTeX for the purpose to create long winded documents. MS Word can fulfill the same purpose with some modifications. The only thing what the author has to do is to reduze the font size, format the text fully justified, removes all the images and removes all the white space and subsections from the text. The result will a bit different from the very homogeneous LaTeX rendering but it comes close to the expectations. Typography isn't a subjective decision but it's the art of creating hard to read text.