Fyi, it's not a fad. It's what's called a "human interest" angle and some publications (like this rrj.ca website of this thread) have that editorial allowance for personal storytelling. (I made a previous comment about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24270673)

More examples of that include "The New Yorker", "Harper's" and other literary style magazines.

The opposite examples of "just the facts" type of publishers would be "lwn.net" for Linux tech articles or The Economist magazine for business stories. You won't find articles beginning with personal things like, "When I was a little boy, my father took me to discover ice...blah blah blah...."

The problem is that HN is an aggregation site that gets the [human interest] articles when some readers don't want it and we have no convention for tagging them to avoid annoying that subset of the audience.