> And will conciseness and readability even matter in the long term?

Fair question. Right now the way for humans to understand code is to read it and that'll be easier if the code is concise and readable. But it's possible that we'll end up in a situation where the code is separate from the explanatory materials that humans need. This is similar to math where we might have impenetrable Lean proofs of theorems and then natural language expositions to explain the proof.