Visit any university library and you'll find that endnotes replaced footnotes long ago, perhaps in the 1950s. In the era before computers, endnotes were far easier to typeset. In todays world, their appearance at the bottom of a page is seen as clutter by most readers.
While this might be true up to a certain point for academic publications in the English-speaking world (and while there is a certain international convergence in recent years), there are also cultural differences. German academic publications are still heavily using footnotes for reference purposes as well as for comments and clarifications. And while footnotes might be perceived as clutter from a typographic point of view (it can be incredibly difficult to typeset certain sorts of academic texts in a visually pleasing way), they are much more practical for readers. Personally, I don’t like reading a book from two ends.
