The target audience is exactly as described - curious but not too bright, easily distracted, and fond of a good narrative with simplistic predigested conclusions, which ideally include a self-improving or reassuring takeaway.
Most pop sci is a strange hybrid of business and personal self-help, with a few tech-ish and sciencey trimmings.
Most of the rest is rehashed biography made of stock anecdotes.
The remainder includes some real science, and is often written by real scientists.
For the sake of argument, let's set aside whether Gladwell's conclusions are correct or not, and just focus on the structure and style of his writing. Not all brains process information the same way. Just like some people are visual learners, and some are auditory learners, some people react better to one type of anecdote versus another. Offering multiple anecdotes or stories around a given topic offers the opportunity for more people to "click" with the concept being presented.
I'll give an example from my own life. I enjoy reading about new technologies, whether programming languages, cloud services, databases, etc. Frequently over the years, I've heard of something, and read a couple of things about it, and then decided "That's not very interesting, I don't think I'd use that, so I can ignore it." Then some time passes and I read something else about it, written from a different point of view. Maybe it describes an application for it that I hadn't considered (and that wasn't presented in the previous things I'd read), or perhaps it relates it to something I already know in such a way that I understand where it fits into my world. I reconsider my position, and find that technology X is, in fact, interesting and worth paying attention to.
That's happened more than once. Probably closer to a dozen times over my career. It's the same thing with books of this nature. If you're the kind of person who can look at a summary of a concept or a new thing, and immediately take stock of what it is, how it works, and how it applies, that's great. You're exactly right, you're not the target audience. That doesn't mean that the people who are the target audience are simple-minded folks who are looking for the intellectual equivalent of junk food. It simply means they process information differently than you do.
The target audience is exactly as described - curious but not too bright, easily distracted, and fond of a good narrative with simplistic predigested conclusions, which ideally include a self-improving or reassuring takeaway.
Most pop sci is a strange hybrid of business and personal self-help, with a few tech-ish and sciencey trimmings.
Most of the rest is rehashed biography made of stock anecdotes.
The remainder includes some real science, and is often written by real scientists.