Maybe sometimes it's that, but I find most of the time, once you are comfortable with it, the formal language is just more useful. I'm beginning to think that attitudes like "they only do X this way to feel superior" are common because it lets you feel superior, but maybe that's me falling into the same trap.

Personally, I do ML and stats for a living, and the notation really does make things easier, while your comment is often thrown at math notation too.