I might see it this way because I've been studying math for a long time (though not professionally most of it) but I don't think modern math is ever made more complicated or hard to understand just for the heck of it. That's because math is already felt as extremely hard for most people.
I think anyone in professional math is working really hard to make the field more comprehensible to themselves and so to the world - and the reason for this is the more a mathematician understands and more compactly they can understand it, the further they can go.
And certainly, the way a mathematician put things curtly makes it harder for the laymen, I think the biggest harm to the layman's understanding of math is a math education that gets people conditioned to not think abstractly and think of math as a series of dull exercises.
I agree. If some mathematicians purposeful obfuscated or made more complicated than necessary certain topics, it would create an arbitrage opportunity for others to clarify and simplify the topic.
There are definitely tangible rewards for those who can clarify and simplify a topic, because it can lead to discoveries and insights.
This gradual clarification of a topic hinges on the actual importance of the topic. If a topic is not important, I can see people getting away with obfuscating or complicating results.
Respectable, pro mathematicians don't obfuscate. But there are definitely math professors in non-top universities who get kicks out of torturing students and think "this is supposed to be hard" etc. I'm definitely a math enthusiast but I have personally met people like that. Typically the exams are under strong time pressure and are more about rote learning of fixed types of exercises and remembering definitions.
On the other hand, I had math profs who radiated curiosity and fun and the exams were just a few questions, but you had to think to solve them and you weren't under much time pressure.
So while mathematicians aren't purposefully obscure, the math people (teachers) the average person interacts with are sometimes purposefully obscure.
I think anyone in professional math is working really hard to make the field more comprehensible to themselves and so to the world - and the reason for this is the more a mathematician understands and more compactly they can understand it, the further they can go.
And certainly, the way a mathematician put things curtly makes it harder for the laymen, I think the biggest harm to the layman's understanding of math is a math education that gets people conditioned to not think abstractly and think of math as a series of dull exercises.