I liked the thing from the Atlantic - it's all story.
The Grisham thing, though, as an example (and I've read and enjoyed most of his books) sounds like a Freshman Lit student trying to show off. It's all 'look at me' prose, rather than story.
Leo spun to life in late July in the restless waters of the far eastern Atlantic, about two hundred miles west of Cape Verde. He was soon spotted from space, properly named, and classified as a mere tropical depression. Within hours he had been upgraded to a tropical storm.
For a month, strong dry winds had swept across the Sahara and collided with the moist fronts along the equator, creating swirling masses that moved westward as if searching for land. When Leo began his journey, there were three named storms ahead of him, all in a menacing row that threatened the Caribbean. All three would eventually follow their expected routes and bring heavy rains to the islands but nothing more.
Which all boils down to the tired, metaphoric cliché:
A storm was coming.Sorry, John.
I have a very difficult time reading stuff like this now. Perhaps I've become a minimalist, where the only thing of importance is the story experience - character and emotion and happenings. As Elmore Leonard said, anything that sounds like writing has to go. Increasingly, it all reads as pretentious drivel. And even though, from an aficionado's perspective, I appreciate the clever turn of phrase or the occasional purple passage, when it comes to fiction, I want the author to be as transparent as possible, which is not to say devoid of personal style.
In the example from the Atlantic, the story is dripping with style. But not as an egotistical flourish. The style is central in tightening and focusing the narrative - which certainly can, and often does, affect pacing.
We can look at pacing as the rise and fall of tension, or page-turniness. First past always suffers from a lack of tension, because of the safe distance thing. Apart from some goofy gimmick, the MC will survive to tell the tale. (And, yes, there are some stories, specifically, ludicrous, melodramatic adventures with over the top MCs, that work amazingly well in first past precisely because of this.)
But, by and large, pacing and pov work much like angular momentum in physics. A common example is how a skater spins. When they draw their arms and legs closer to the center of rotation - they spin faster. Narratives work the same way. As we close in on the MC's experience, thereby tightening the narrative - it spins faster. The stakes become more dire. The tension rises. As we draw back, creating distance between the reader and the MC’s dramatic peril, such as with wordy, colorful, non-story passages, the pace slows. I think this is why first present and close third work so well - we can still slow things down to a crawl if we so choose, such as when we need to let a moment breathe, but we can do so without sacrificing any of the immediacy, and therefore, the reader’s engagement.
As a side note, the effect of narrative distance on pacing is completely separate from story beats or action sequences - even in mid-chase, mid-fall or mid-shootout, we can still slow things down with narrative distance.