The typeface is inspired by stencil lettering.

Puzzling design is definitely not a contemporary trend. It was more common in the 1980-90s, but the style reached its height when CSS wasn't available, most visitors were unfamiliar with the Web etc. so pulling this off in a major publication like the NYT would be risky. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Carson_(graphic_design...

(To wit, it's in The New York Times Magazine: its printed version has had experimental design styling for quite a while)

The steelmanned version of your comment might be something like "graphic designers these days really seem to have abandoned every recognizable principle of 'good' design". That would be a claim that design quality is deteriorating, like a lot of other aspects of civilization. There's a case to be made for that perspective.

But I'm guessing you just meant that hip graphic design/typography often confounds your own expectations. If you aren't a design practitioner/enthusiast, I don't know why you would expect your preconceptions of what design should look like to be validated.

Funny that the same can be said about the subject of the article.

I have the sort of opposite reaction - so many things are basically either bugs in implementation or bugs in specification that I find lots of things unusable.