Is there much precedent for writing scalable copy? Yes! I used to have to cut wire stories to fit. Let's say 25 newspapers run the same wire story, each with different length requirements. That's 25 editors who have to make different cuts, and some might in haste cut sections that are actually pretty important. Some writers give cues to the editors -- "cut this graf if necessary" -- to avoid that happening.
Is there much NEED for scalable copy? Yes! It potentially saves copy editors a lot of work. And if the "magic" can be automated, it saves a lot of time, too!
And it's not surprising, because writing itself is a technology in a traditional sense. Further, it's more "tech" oriented (in the more contemporary sense) than you give it credit for.
It's very close to coding: It's structural, admits of procedure, copy reuse, partakes of historical design advancements, adapts to tech around it, etc. Fuzzier, maybe. But try and do it well, sometime. The edges are harder than you might think.
(And, as an exasperated aside: Ugh!! There is no wall between creative types and tech types! No such types exist in the first place. Only weird, sticky prejudices.)
To have a whole section arbitrarily cut from the version of an article that user X reads on their iPad vs user Y on a big screen laptop would be met with skepticism at best, outright horror at worst.
I am a writer as well and I can't imagine writing like that or how such a system could possibly work from a technical perspective, much less a UI perspective.
PS. I didn't mean to say that creative people can't be technical or vice-versa, just that writing tends to be a creative-oriented job while programming is obviously a technical-oriented job. Obviously there is overlap between the two and many people excel at both. Sorry if it came out sounding like I believe there is a creative|technical binary.