Confusion is always possible. But I’d wager if you put “This, that and the other thing” to 100 people, 99 would interpret it as three items. The one who didn’t really would, but would say they didn’t because they wouldn’t want to pass up an opportunity to be pedantic about the Oxford comma.
There are many places, in sentences, where one could put commas, but in many, if not most, of those places, the comma is, essentially, unnecessary, and serves, only, to break up the flow. The “Oxford comma slot” is in my opinion one of those places.
Unless you are using Courier New of course or some other monospaced font.
It was drilled into me in junior high typing class to put in two spaces (which I think was already obsolete at the time as we were working on computers but the teacher was just going by what they had been taught). I still have to search and replace my documents to get rid of the extra spaces I put in automatically.
It’s a stylistic choice, but I do feel that the Oxford comma adds both clarity and consistency. I agree with you that peppering sentences with unnecessary commas is an annoying characteristic of bad writing, and I suspect probably more prevalent than its opposite, the comma-deprived run-on sentence. But the Oxford comma in my view is not an example of an unnecessary comma. From what I’ve been able to find, contrary to its name the Oxford comma is a more prevalent standard in US and Canadian writing than in British writing.
To add to the woes of comma misuse, some of the guidance one finds on the internet is stupid. This, however, is a pretty good guide for anyone interested:
I must admit it’s an ingrained habit of mine, still lingering from the days of typewriters. I don’t find it any more annoying than slightly wider than normal line spacing. Sometimes white space helps readability, depending on the font and its size and the general formatting style. The latter makes a big difference. In many Word documents, for instance, and right here on Discourse, a blank line between paragraphs is standard and desirable. But it drives me crazy if it appears in a book, whether printed or on Kindle. A book should have indented paragraphs, and blank lines or white space should be used as a major section delimiter or to set off special text.
This is purely and simply age-related. Those of us of a certain number of decades were told, enjoined, laid down the law to, bade, directed, mandated, and commanded to always use two spaces after a period, question mark, or exclamation point. Always. For every school paper and for every sheet of paper in work, academic, or publishing contexts. If you didn’t put in two spaces you might as well not use periods at all. Sentences began with a capital and ended with two spaces. That was the RULE.
I’m sure if you never lived through that very long era but came to the writing world through computers with proportional fonts you can’t understand this at all, any more than you can understand men putting on suits to attend a ballgame or go to a movie. That’s just the way it was.
I’m fortunate in that converting to the one space convention was easy. For other people it was more like converting from a QWERTY to a Dvorak keyboard, hard and simple to mess up.
I don’t know who is still teaching the use of two spaces but I bet they’re out there messing up kids’ minds with nonsense RULES just like the other hundreds of nonsense RULES teachers have been feeding kids in English classes for a century.