Otherwise you can end up like David Foster Wallace and you're just ejaculating vocabulary words onto the reader for no reason other than to show off how clever you are and no one knows what the fuck you're talking about in the middle of a sentence

The whole point of Wallace's style is that it's supposed to represent his perception of reality.

Sometimes in life you carry on even when you don't quite understand what's going on. Sometimes you have conversations where people presume prior knowledge. Sometimes it is simple and mundane. Sometimes it is complex and confusing. Sometimes you're in a new situation and it's like you're in a completely different world. Sometimes you are lost. Sometimes ad nauseam.

All these sort of things are reflected and directly inform the way he writes. And as much as telling a story, his style is an attempt distil into narrative form a lot of the things about the human condition that we tend to ignore. So you're not only being told a story, you're also reading a comment on all these factors in life and being made to feel them (or that's the intent, at least).

Now you could argue that he fails or that there are more effective ways of achieving his goal. And those points could probably be argued quite convincingly. I mean, I'm reading the The Pale King at the moment and I almost stopped at around ~50 pages in due to a particularly tedious chapter.

But to say that he simply ejaculated vocabulary words onto the reader for no reason other than to show off how clever he is seems like an unnecessary and dismissive slight.