And "our" generation has already had its attention span reduced, not even on purpose but from e.g. having access to fast internet & multiple tabs. I can't read a book on programming back to back (I don't think I ever could btw), it's good enough for me to google it to find a solution for the one problem I'm trying to solve at this time.

But I do miss out on in-depth knowledge of a library or language that way. But there is no value in gaining said in-depth knowledge when the stack & libraries I work with changes every couple of months or years.

In the 8 bit days there were programming books meant to be read back to back. I loved them as a kid - though I'm not sure that I learned much from that exercse. Even K&R "the C programming language" (first edition, the second edition wasn't as readable from what I remember, though that might be just because it was too repetitive for someone who had read the first edition) could be read that way.

These days that isn't a good use of paper books. There is rarely any reason to start with any one construct, and if you are not a novice programmer you know there must be something that does what you need and don't want the book to assume you understand the syntax of the while loop when you look up the do-while loop.

It comes from YouTube wanting to compete with TikTok, yes. And it's become so ridiculously common on YouTube because the platform pushes the hell out of shorts compared to normal videos; as a creator, I can get 10/100/1000 times more views from a short than a normal video covering the same topic. So a lot of creators ended up jumping on the shorts train as a gold rush.

Of course, it's probably not great in the long term since shorts viewers and longform content viewers are not the same and your CTR can be destroyed thanks to shorts subs not watching your longer videos, but the easy views and subs are still enticing nonetheless.