You start by acknowledging that the status quo in academic writing is a standard of bad, obfuscatory writing

I didn't say that. I said that standards inhibit optimal writing, not that they encourage bad writing. I also didn't say there was a broad pool of publication venues, just enough that you can publish what you want there and read what you want there. For instance, in machine learning, it would be:

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems

AI & Statistics

Journal of Machine Learning Research

Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence

I'm sure you can still find some poorly-written papers there (especially at the conferences, where reviewers are very over-worked), but I would be very surprised if you thought that the papers there were bad and obfuscatory. Reviewers spot obfuscation a mile away and penalize it appropriately.

And being a reviewer isn't particularly high-status, because it's typically an anonymous job.

Yes, I was wrong about that. Being an area chair or sitting on an editorial board is high-status, though, or so I believe.