Really I blame Google for this, obviously any online publication needs to optimise for traffic, they need to pay the bills. But Google's latest algorithm changes quite clearly prioritise longer prose, and so bulking out text in articles has become the norm. It's a shame, and Google have the resources to do better, but unfortunately not the incentives. Most of the pages have some amount of Google ads on them.

Edit: oh okay just downvote because of an observation. Nice community here!