This is missing an important factor for writing: context. There are many places where it's fine to wax lyrical and reach for the thesaurus. But if you're trying to write clearly and concisely then there is something to be said for simplicity.
Eg. many in the tech world are not native English speakers, and this surely translates to most content to be published on the web.
While I do appreciate learning a lot more of the literary English vocabulary, I prefer to do that through well known works of fiction, and only seldomly through texts I read for my work (eg. API documentation).
