I believe you're thinking of an attention step, an immersion into a human interest aspect of the story before the formulaic structure of a traditional introduction. I have no problem with an attention step. I'm using one right now in a paper I hope to have published.

What I object to is an article ostensibly on Topic A that spends the first 60% completely ignoring Topic A in favor of Topic B, only to draw the most fleeting and hand-wavy of analogies between the two, and subsequently pretending as if the author had presented some work of scholarship on Topic A.

"Until halfway through" was not an exaggeration in my original comment.