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Not even close to true. So many great thinkers >100 years old are directly readable and extremely insightful: Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Lao Tzu, Thucydides, Montaigne, just to name random people off the top of my head
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A) you’re reading translations by more recent people B) you don’t know what you’re NOT getting or misunderstanding because you don’t know what you don’t know about the historical context
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Do you not see any value in the effort? Also is it safe to assume you're not a buyer of Nassim's "Lindy Effect" then?
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You misunderstand. I'm happy to read contextualized commentaries and translations and later critical interpretations. The Lindy effect is interesting and a reasonable prediction factor on survival, but I think a bad heuristic for what to read or treat as default "true".
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Doing the reading and thinking to rebuild those intellectual environments is one of the most enjoyable games I have ever discovered. Furthermore, I would counter that there is a parallel to the phenomenon that we best learn our grammar after some of another language.
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So true. Giordano Bruno keeps calling libraries no one supports anymore: astrology, memory palace, Lull's combinatorics...
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Major thinkers don’t write in code, so they tend to be accessible. That is also why Locke is more major than Heidegger, for example. Complex ideas in rather plain language latch on better than complex ideas in code.