If it was merely 35 years ago and not 40, that's almost the same. I believe that the US magazine Chess World was the last of the Mohicans and they gave up on "descriptive" in the 1980s, after FIDE decided to no longer accept it.
Sure, players were slow to adjust, but even the slowest of the slow should have done so in more than 3 decades.
If someone can't find 10-15 minutes in 30 years to learn notation, they are not trying.
Long algebraic is longer. Bf1-c4 is longer than B-B4. Even short algebraic has gotten longer. The move we write as "exd5" today would just have been written "ed" years back.
But we don't use algebraic because it's shorter, the main reason we use it is because we thought people wouldn't be able to grasp the idea of each square having two names, depending on which side was looking at the board.
Another reason is that it's supposedly less error prone (I say "supposedly" because I looked at a kid's scoresheet recently, and it had so many notation errors that I couldn't reconstruct the game.)
But with Descriptive, imagine a situation where Bc4 is a reasonable move, worth considering, but Bf4 is a totally ridiculous move that nobody would even consider. The correct way to write Bc4 in Descriptive would be B-QB4. But if B-KB4 is so absurd that nobody would consider it, people often tend not to notice that it's even possible, and so miswrite the move as B-B4 instead.
I always write ed and wouldn't dream of using exd5. Why don't people use the shorthand algebraic?
Well, short algebraic is shorter, and so easier and quicker to write. It's easier to write "e4" than "e2-e4" (or e2e4). But some books, like the algebraic version of Tal's book on the 1960 championship use long algebraic. (Topalov's book on the 2006 championship doesn't).
Another way that algebraic has changed is that when the USCF first started pushing it, they didn't use x for capture. They used a colon instead, so Nxe5 would be written as N:e5. That looks really odd to me, but someone told me that's the way they do it in German.
I have question. If I write down my moves in descriptive notation will I be disqualified?
Maybe you might, depending on the requirements. But anyone who would do that doesn't deserve to run a tournament.
Just some historical context: the so-called "descriptive notation" went extinct 40 year ago in the US, 100 years ago in the UK, 150 years ago everywhere else. This seems enough time to get used to the "novelty". Unless someone spent the last 50 years in a coma, but I'm sure that most arbiters would be willing to make an exception in that particular case.