I see that you have marked this question as "academic writing" but I'm going to talk a bit (ok, a lot!) about other types of writing as well to give you an idea about how you can think about paragraph breaks, in academic writing and otherwise.

Fiction

In fiction you have at least one hard rule for paragraph breaking:

In dialog, you always write one character's dialog per paragraph.

This is so the reader will always know who speaks, but it can also be thought to mimic how a camera would treat dialog in a visual medium like film or TV.

You want the camera on the person speaking, and when you cut to another person, you also do a paragraph break.

You can use the camera-technique for other parts of fictional writing, e.g. a new paragraph when a description of one object in the room changes to a description of another.

I suggest you think of your academic topic as a room with parts of the topic as objects in that room and your narrative voice as a camera moving through that room. When the camera cuts to another object (or another aspect of that object), you add a paragraph break.

Blogging

When I blog, or generally write for the Internet I keep my paragraphs (and my sentences) as short as possible.

An internet audience tends to lose interest otherwise.

(Meaning this text generally has the shortest paragraphs and sentences of all my writing.)

I don't think there's a requirement that academic writing has to be boring. And I don't think making the text easy to read would dumb it down. After all, quantum mechanics will be quantum mechanics regardless of the readability of the text.

Visually

A single paragraph going page up and page down gives your readers the impression an almost impossible task lies ahead; plowing through your text.

Long paragraphs are depressing!

A reader should be able to look at a page and get the impression that they have several "mouthfuls" of information to "chew down" and that they have been prepared by the author to be just big enough.

Several paragraph breaks on a page also give the impression the writer has the know how to split the text into sections, a bit like a butcher knows how to cut a piece of meat.

You can also use paragraph breaks to make sentences you really want to stress as central to your topic stand out (like the "long paragraphs are depressing"-paragraph above).

Breathing

I tend to think about my paragraph breaks as a point where the reader can take a breath, so I try to make my paragraph breaks in sync with breathing.

This also means that a bunch of short paragraphs might make your reader start hyperventilating.

I had that experience once and had to put the book down. I've also had the experience of paragraphs so long I "suffocated" and fell asleep... so paragraph breaking is important in this aspect.

However, breathing is also affected by sentence-length, so if you feel you need a long paragraph, keeping an eye on sentence-length, and varying it, might keep your reader conscious...

How do I know when/how to break a paragraph?

The discussion above talks almost solely about the size of paragraphs, however, I hope you've already been able to guess how I separate my paragraphs:

By topic/content.

I think the best way to describe it is that several paragraphs can address one topic, but one paragraph should not address several topics. I.e. it's okay to cover a topic using several paragraphs, but will likely be confusing if you change topic mid-paragraph.

As for "bridge sentences": I have never heard of them, and if I use them, it's pure intuition.

Which brings me to my last, and perhaps most important, point:

Reading is writing

You should (absolutely) read texts just like the one you want to write.

This being an academic writing question, I am going to assume (and hope) you have a pile of other people's work as references and sources (and that you've read them at least once).

How do they split their texts into paragraphs?

Can you improve on it?

Do it! ;)

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