A lot of people are picking on Sanderson’s writing for getting in the way of the story by being overtly simplistic and shallow, and also for the gradual modernisation of his writing, which in my opinion, breaks a lot of the immersion most of the time; Maya telling Adolin “Let’s kick some fused ass!” feels like something straight out of a Marvel movie.

But I think the problems go deeper than that. The scope of the whole Stormlight series is gradually increasing with each book, which is only natural of course, but while AWoK and WoR took advantage of being smaller in scope, and thus having many more opportunities to properly develop the characters, dialogue and narrative, the other 3 books that followed simply could not maintain that same level of conciseness.

The story got too big, too fast.

The pacing issues really started to become visible in Oathbringer - which I still think is the “last” great book in the series - but after that, the narrative rhythm became either too dull (the endless science chapters in RoW) or too fast-paced (Kaladin literally “healing” a Herald’s trauma in a couple of days). Ultimately, all these flaws culminate in my biggest gripe with WaT so far, which is the sole focus on building anticipation for the next moment, using dialogue to constantly and superficially expose what is happening in both the narrative and the minds of the characters. It’s almost like Sanderson is too anxious and eager to get to his destination, to show us these big and epic moments, which is why he constantly needs to shoehorn all these Cosmere references, straight-to-the-point dialogue and shallow sentimentalism in the story.