The conclusion I came to is that the audience is very tech-savvy and is used to activating Reader Mode when they encounter pages like this.
Some of it can be appealing, when basic ergonomic needs are met (readable text size and line length, adequate margins, and so forth). Most is just brutally pretentious, IMO.
The irony of this on an article about how developers ignore users on low-performance mobile devices
Only thing that annoyed me is that there are very lengthy appendices. Thus the scroll bar suggests the main article is much longer than it actually is.
Pretty sure the text size is likely to be marginal from an accessibility PoV, and the line length doesn’t aid readability