It's not just the vocabulary, but the structure, the whole style. It's long, it's very meandering, it's very illustrative, but rarely direct and informative. Not many people have the time and desire to read something that presents so little value to them.
I might be a minority, but I'm willing to stick out my neck for meandering, illustrative, and indirect writing.
Don't get me wrong, if it was the only thing available, I'd probably go crazy, too. But I believe there is a time and place in my "reading diet" for this kind of long-form journalism.
As your adjectives suggest, New Yorker articles are less bullets of breathlessly-repeated facts, and more illustrations of nuanced scenes and interactions. I think it's natural, because life is messy and meandering, too.
That being said, most of their articles have very well-defined and well-informed points. They don't make them by stating it up front, but by drawing a picture, observing some of its details, and asking you to form your own opinion. We can disagree, but to me it feels more intellectually-honest than other forms of journalism.
Yes, it takes longer to get there. Yes, some of the details (what clothes people are wearing, what the rooms smell like, whatever) could probably be removed without compromising the structural integrity. But the New Yorker is about structural integrity and style. It's like the "literary fiction" of news. I don't read each article in each magazine, but it's still pretty rare that I've regretted finishing one; maybe once every other month.
What about the bleatings of a person like Kevin D. Williamson, whose prose I identify as horrifically boring, not only because he isn't a deep thinker on any of the subject matter he writes about, but also because he spends about 80% of any essay trying to beat his audience over the head with how familiar he is with obscure and / or inconsequential tangential topics to the matter at hand. I don't have an issue with writers being descriptive. I very much have a problem with writers trying to prove they're the Dennis Miller of serious thought.
I can't say I've heard of Mr. Williamson, but it looks like he hasn't written for the New Yorker.
I'm talking more of the style used by Ben Taub [0] [1], or Sam Knight [2] [3]. More investigative than "think piece", although there are some big ideas in the presentation.
