This could be from any age really. I remember reading lots of books like Harry Potter as a 4th grader to seem smart to the teachers looking at me but I didn’t understand any of it. When the big YA dystopian boom was happening, I read tons of terrible YA dystopias to seem cool but many of them frustrated me.
To be fair to Dante, he warns the reader in Canto II to be careful and stop reading if they aren’t following the story by comparing reading Paradiso to sailing a small boat on choppy waters.