This isn't a modern fad, it's literally the point of storytelling.

Point is, reporting should not involve storytelling at all.

This type of reporting is called a "feature story", as opposed to "straight news" or "hard news". The whole point of a feature is to tell an interesting but not necessarily time-sensitive story about something which happened.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_story

Sure. I'm just tired of all news being of this kind (or long-form writing). I can't find any news sources optimized for communicating facts and facts only, as efficiently as possible.

All news is not like this. In fact, most news is not like this. I am not sure where you are getting your news from?

When reading/writing news, "news stories" are one option as seen here, and "news reports" are another option. I think so long as there's a group of people who prefer the story format, better to offer that format than leave those people disinterested in consuming news.

I wonder if they realize they're leaving the other group disinterested in consuming news.

I don't read news anymore. Haven't for years. Initially it was because I found it too depressing, later on I realized that a) almost nothing on the news is meaningful to my life and b) it's mostly full of bullshit designed to grab eyeballs, but recently I realized yet another motivation: I don't read news because of the narrative style. I'd probably read some if I could find a source that actually cared about inverted pyramid, and ideally just made the story a list of bullet points. Having to burn brain cycles to tease out actual facts from someone's storytelling is just a waste of time to me.