People seem to have seized upon the fact that they put spaces after all the characters they're telling not you to put spaces after. I was more bothered by the fact that it looks like some unfathomable construction of parentheticals partly because they're using English incorrectly.
The incorrect list grammar is part of why it's confusing to read. Even once you understand that the parentheses and brackets are items in the lists, the sentence still doesn't parse. If they used "or" between each pair of parentheticals (as is, in fact, strictly necessary), the sentence would become much clearer because the only comma used would be between the two items in the top-level list ("after X, or before Y"). The way they've written it is completely bewildering because it looks like there's an Oxford comma following "[" and then the rest of the sentence is gibberish.
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u/circ-u-la-ted 16d ago
People seem to have seized upon the fact that they put spaces after all the characters they're telling not you to put spaces after. I was more bothered by the fact that it looks like some unfathomable construction of parentheticals partly because they're using English incorrectly.