No novel is allowed to lollygag around the point its trying to achieve in the way these articles flagrantly waste your time.
It's like someone misunderstood that the act of moving your eyes along the page is not interesting in and of itself.
With barely less than a second's though: Watership Down, a hugely popular novel in the 1970s, spends untold amounts of text/paper immersed in detailed descriptions of the flora that the characters are moving through or eating.
Why not just say "I don't enjoy this style of writing", rather than trying to come up with some supposedly objective metrics for how other people should write?
The distinction can be quite arbitrary, but it usually does stand out.
Herman Melville and Neal Stephenson also come to mind. In nonfiction, John McFee.
I'm not accusing you of doing this on purpose, but there's a certain amount of equivocation in the phrase "news article" there. Yes, that's a style that is recommended for factual news articles in a newspaper context, but that's not the only form of "news article".
Call this a "news essay" instead and give it its own style and it might make more sense. It's been around for a long time. Could call it the 20th-century equivalent of clickbait and probably not be far off.
"There's an exciting revolutionary change to physics coming... but first, the full life story of the thesis advisor's influential father... keep reading...."
Arguably it's more a form of entertainment than information.