But generally, in the jobs I've had, a "~5000 word mini-essay" is not going to get read in detail. 5000 words is 20 double-spaced pages. If I sent that to a coworker I'd expect it to sit in their inbox and never get read. At most they would skim it and video call me on Teams to ask me to just explain it.
Unless that is some kind of formal report, you need to put the work in to make it shorter if you want the person on the other end to actually engage.
Christ I'd love to get a 5000 word mini-essay from a colleague about ANYTHING we work on because we can't get into the details about nothing these days. It's all bullet-points, evasive jargon and hand waving. No wonder productivity is at an all time low - nobody thinks through anything at all!
I agree it's too long for an email, but it could be a reasonable length for a document that could avoid years of engineering costs. I'd still start with a TLDR section and maybe have a separate meeting to get everyone on the same page about what the main concerns are. People will spend hours talking about a single concern, so it's not like they didn't have the time, they just find it easier to speak than to read. But if the concerns are only raised verbally they're more likely to be forgotten, so not only was that time wasted, but you've gone ahead with the concerning proposal and incur the years of costs.
A hard fact I've learned is that even if people never read documents, it can be very helpful to have hard evidence that you wrote certain things and shared them ahead of time. It shifts the narrative from "you didn't anticipate or communicate this" to "we didn't read this" and nobody wants to admit that it was because it was too long, especially if it's well-written and clearly trying to avoid problems.
It's still better to make it shorter than not, but you also can't be blamed for being thorough and detailed within reason. I try to strike a balance where I get a few questions so I know where more detail was needed, rather than write so much that I never get any questions because nobody ever read it, but this depends just as much on the audience as the author.
Additionally, some problems have gone on for so long without any attention to solving them that they’ve created whole new problems—and then new problems, and then new problems… at jobs where you discover over time that management has kicked a lot of problems down the road, it can take a lot of words to walk people through the connection between a pattern of behavior (or a pattern of avoidance) and a myriad of seemingly unrelated issues faced by many.
I’ll read a 20 page paper if I’m really invested in learning what it has to say, but after reading the abstract and maybe the intro, I decide quickly not to read the rest. Only a few 20 page papers are worth reading.
I think what your coworker did was horrible.
But generally, in the jobs I've had, a "~5000 word mini-essay" is not going to get read in detail. 5000 words is 20 double-spaced pages. If I sent that to a coworker I'd expect it to sit in their inbox and never get read. At most they would skim it and video call me on Teams to ask me to just explain it.
Unless that is some kind of formal report, you need to put the work in to make it shorter if you want the person on the other end to actually engage.