The first is because, yes it allows busy readers to access the most salient facts first. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly from the point of print newspaper production, it allowed subs to always cut from the bottom, without having to read the whole piece carefully...
Newspapers would go through several editions throughout the night as new stories came in or existing stories were expanded. What started life as a front page lead might find itself moved to page three and progressively shortened, possibly down to a 1 sentence news-in-brief NIB.
The pyramid style let subs always fit a story into the available space, simply by cutting everything progressively from the bottom.
This story in Wired is not a news story and is not written as a news story. It is a feature story and its construction follows different rules.
It's a very good feature story, in my opinion.
Practices which show contempt for the reader's time and interest are ultimately counterproductive.
Narrow (succinct) at the top and broad (detailed) at the bottom seems like a normal pyramid to me.
An "inverted pyramid" would be like one of those poems that describes fine details first and only in the last sentence reveals what it's been describing.
I don't doubt that it's actually called that, but it seems backwards to me.
It is ordered most relevant to least.
And yet, news media are the last place you're likely to find articles written in this style. Somehow, they manage to deliver the exact opposite of what they should be. A fractal of confusion, recursively unfolding noise.
(It's as if they were making a lot of money on maximizing the time a reader is engaged with any given article. It's as if - and I know this sounds crazy - the articles were there just to hold the user down, while they're being exposed to something else...)