On a wide 4K monitor, the text is not centred, stretching from the far left to the far right, making it very difficult to continuously read a sentence from left to right. Limits like 80 characters per line exist for a reason.
The text is formatted in a very annoying manner, line by line, sentence by sentence, like it was spit out by a debugger in a terminal. I'm trying to compare this to the experience of reading a column in a newspaper with proper typography and visual layout.
The page already loads a css stylesheet which is mostly empty, for whatever reason, and also tries to load an analytics plugin with javascript, so I don't see the reason to omit basic stylesheets to at least make it readable.
Compared to the "full" version with an adblocker, even with JS disabled, in my eyes it's still a significant step down.
Very apropos to HN. The home page is beautiful: http://lite.cnn.io/en