It feels so much against the spirit of the site as well. "Ignore the actual research in favour of my N=1 preference, and don't worry your users will jump through various non-obvious UX hoops to get the same behaviour that could have been default."
I much more sympathize with them tbh. Let browser makers figure out how to give the easy to use controls to users. Let them add some override for the number of columns and columns max width and gap and so on. Or let extensions handle that. Whatever. But don't rely on each site prescribing how I have to read it.