Is "flowery language" frowned upon in engineering and STEM related research? I work in an engineering field (related to AI, machine learning, etc.) and something I found interesting is whenever I use &quot;big words&quot; or even long words  like &quot;substantiate&quot; or &quot;corroborates&quot; while compiling a draft to be submit to a conference and such, I will get a request from my co-authors demanding me to change them.
For example:

&quot;these related works are germane to our present discussion.&quot; I got a
request to change the word &quot;germane&quot; to something else. Really?
Or &quot;...therefore, the scenario considered in [reference] is situated diametrically
opposite to ours.&quot; I was told to change &quot;diametrically&quot;. Really?
&quot;The experiments in [references] corroborates with our results&quot;. I was told to change corroborates to &quot;collaborates&quot;.

There are a lot more examples, especially in the latest draft. But I don't want to point them out just in case my colleagues are reading this forum. :-)
Mind you, this is all in the introduction of the paper, hence no way to confuse it with any technical terminology. This happens to me so frequently that I became almost clairvoyant as to which sentences I will need to rephrase in the upcoming revision.
My intention is merely for the writing to be conversational, and this is done in order to distinguish our works from some of the truly monotonous writing styles pervasive in this field.
Also worth noting is that some of the top authors in this field uses very flowery language (sometimes in my opinion excessively so), so you can say that I'm perhaps subconsciously trying to imitate them.
We are working in a North American university. However, some of my colleagues are non-native speakers (who have stayed here for something like 20 plus years). I wonder if this phenomenon is more wide spread or it is just happening to me.
There's nothing wrong with long words. The real issue with your writing is that it is redundant.

&quot;these related works are germane to our present discussion.&quot;

In this sentence, &quot;germane&quot; just stands for &quot;related&quot;, so you're effectively saying &quot;these related works are related&quot;. Here you are using the English cliche of pairing a common word with a rare synonym, which we also see in phrases like &quot;trials and tribulations&quot; or &quot;vim and vigor&quot;. As in these examples, you include the common word because without it, people won't always know what the rare word means. But the very act of doing that makes the rare word completely useless. Redundancy in this form should basically always be removed.

&quot;...therefore, the scenario considered in [reference] is situated diametrically opposite to ours.&quot;

This is another example of the cliche above. The word &quot;diametrically&quot; isn't doing any work the word &quot;opposite&quot; isn't already doing. It's only there for the purpose of being a long word.

&quot;The experiments in [references] corroborates with our results&quot;.

This is not correct usage: the word &quot;with&quot; shouldn't be there. Incorrect usage of a long word is very bad: people who don't know it will be annoyed with you, and people who do will judge you.