It's "readable" in the most technical sense of the word, but it's exceptionally obfuscated and needlessly convoluted. Whatever that paper is trying to say could be succinctly and clearly expressed in a page or two, at most. But it wouldn't look as what the authors perceive to be "sciency", because behind the grandiloquent language is invariably a pretty simple premise and experimentation (or a survey in this case) invariably designed to confirm biases, rather than challenge them. It's ubiquitous in the social sciences (see: Sokal experiment) and only going to get much worse with the advent of LLMs that will enable streamlined obfuscation.

And no I'm (obviously?) not speaking of every single instance, as for a topic like this there will always be some exception or another. I am saying that as an aggregate - sports participation is down, and participation trophies are up.