I was thinking about why I can never really get into reading a majority of manga as opposed to other types of illustrated stories and I think I figured out why. IMO the pages are just too crowded for my tiny brain to decompress, what with all the overlapping panels and razor thin lines between panels and characters popping out of panels and going halfway across the page. i get confused and a lot of time its too much work to figure out wtf is happening.

i like the art style but a lot of the highly polished pro stuff just makes me feel claustrophobic and i quit reading it after a few pages.

I've noticed that, including in some of my older work. Sometimes the paneling just gets so cluttered that it's visually overwhelming and hard to follow. That's a big part of why, with my newer work, I've been using more stripped down cinematic paneling with very few pop-outs.

There are ways to do super busy page layouts without them getting jumbled, but you need to REALLY know how to use color and contrast and empty space and a bunch of other stuff so it flows well.

I also a lot of trouble reading busy layouts and then trying to recreate them.

So I usually don't. If I want to show lots of images I'll leave out the panel lines and try to have the action flow how the your eye will scan the page. Upper left across and “Z” pattern. Studies show it's human nature and even those who come from cultures that read right to left first glance at a page is in the upper left.

Look at an aircraft carrier. There's a reason why the island is on the landing pilot's right. A pilot will naturally break left when in trouble. The same with reading a page.

I can understand that, most of mangas are clearly written to be elaborate novels rather than illustrated shorts, I guess it's because in Japanese there's less text so it isn't as “crowded” as it looks like when it's translated to English

I think that it's a matter of personal taste. I agree with the over-saturated pages and sometimes hard to follow actions in a single page. Paneling is a thing that has to be mastered. But if you only see the most ‘commercial’ or popular ones I can't arguee that. If you look for Junji Ito, Inio Asano, Akira Hiramoto's art, you may change that concept. On the opposite side, many american style comics have an overwhelming amount of dialogue on a single page. Now that I'm mostly into webtoon style comics, paneling isn't an issue, the majority are just squares and the vertical scrolling is easy to follow/understand.