The "in the following" expression

I am a physicist and while reading research articles I quite commonly find the expression "In the following", below you can find two examples:

In the following, we will (verb) …

or

… will be discussed in the following.

However this expression always sounds (reads) off to me. Somehow I cannot accept that in this cases "following" could be used as a noun, always as an adjective, and a noun – be it "chapter", "section" – should follow "the following".

But let me deepen my frustration with the topic. My mother tongue is Portuguese and I have read English books since I am 12. Whilst doing my physics master’s degree I used several textbooks written by American authors, but it was only when I started my work career in optics, and started reading research articles, that I started noticing this expression (it does sound so horrible to me that I would have noticed it before).

Now, optics research in my area was – and in certain part still is – dominated by German researchers. I also live in Germany since 2010 due to that fact. I notice that my German colleagues love to use that expression, because they have the literal translation of "in the following" as "im Folgenden".

I later found that indeed in the English dictionary the use of "the following" as noun is fine, but I wonder if this is just a neologism due to the almost full century of the current scientific proliferation, as rarely do I see American or British authors using that expression.

So, to condense my question in two:

Does anyone know if this is a neologism, product of non-native speakers being forced to use English for communication?

When doing revisions of my colleagues’ works I always suggest changing this expression to the adjective case. Should I just let it go, or does this actually enhance readability? I really find the expression horrible, like something is utterly missing, is this also the case with native English speakers?

PS: I did find this question which does partly answers my questions, regarding dialects, but which in the examples never uses "following" as noun. Also this one which in the examples does not use "in the following", but simply "the following:" followed by an enumeration, which is totally fine by me, and also something I would use, because I see it as a special kind of adjective? Like, it gives a quality to each following item, or the enumeration, which is not the same kind of quality I see in "in the following."

I am really sorry for the long rambling.