This is as close as philosophy gets to a sleeper hit. Skepticism in the time of Sextus Empiricus was in a far state from its popularity during the Middle Academy. His rediscovery happened really only during the Renaissance, with the printing of a Latin translation of the work. Without this work (and the others by Sextus), the history of philosophy might be very different. Scholasticism was a doctrine ripe for criticism, and Pyrrhonism does not mediate its criticism in any way. Montaigne, Bayle, Berkeley, and Hume, the most famous skeptics or skeptic-adjacent philosophers of the Enlightenment, were all directly influenced by this book. (Descartes' famous flirtation with skepticism, I do not know the relation with this - there is scholarship somewhere on that.) It remains throughout the Enlightenment as somewhat of a surreptitious threat for what happens if positive philosophy fails.

Neither the arguments nor the prose are subtle or delicate. He really will just give you five or so different arguments for why you can't assert something natural, and only cares if at least one of them works. "Neither this nor that." The proofs are sometimes incredibly strong, and sometimes employ mere sophistry, especially when his definitions feel purposefully weak or simplified. It's not a page-turner and might not need to be read all the way through, though it is not quite a slog. (It took me only 2 or 3 days to finish.) Part of this is simply the antiquated mode of presentation.

For the non-skeptics - most people - this work is more interesting as perhaps a stress test on your ways of thinking. If it can be made to survive some of the significant arguments of Sextus, that's a good way of using it. For the skeptics - and being a skeptic is not so bad at all - this is a useful book: the point of which is to live "adhering to appearances, in accordance with the normal rules of life, undogmatically, seeing that we cannot remain wholly inactive. And it would seem that this regulation of life is fourfold, and that one part of it lies in the guidance of nature, another in the constraint of the passions, another in the tradition of laws and customs, another in the instruction of the arts." This is not the everything-is-pointless sort of doctrine that its opponents make it out to be, and it is (unconsciously) what no small number of sensible and ordinary people adhere to in life.