The problem is, this way we would spend 72 hours a day on all these 3k word articles for getting one page worth of chitchat material.

I bet that tl;dr extension that would allow to jump directly to highlights (or mark them) would be pretty popular. If anyone knows one, please share.

Something like that could work like existing models that generate abstracts for research papers. I don't know if these techniques have gone mainstream yet, but my understanding is that they are under active development. If you can generate one or two paragraphs that summarize the findings of a paper, it's not much of a stretch to imagine an application that generates pop-sci articles of the desired length.