>> whitespace on modern UIs ... Usability

Here here! But you're understating it.

Less information dense, and smaller fonts is an appalling use of type, and layout. These first principals about type, font, page layout, they are about readability, and scalability...

We have 600 years of printing, of typography to lean on. Thats 600 years of refinement on line length, spacing and size. The human eye didn't evolve in the last two decades all these lessons still apply!

All that would make sense if I were reading the page but here I'm scanning the titles to find the few stories of interest in a forest. Optimizing for scanning shouldn't require so much scrolling and Load more.

I don't think it's possible to make everyone happy here. I find it a lot faster and easier to scan the titles when there's more whitespace between them. If they're too close together, I'll end up constantly losing my place and rereading the same ones multiple times, or accidentally read two lines at the same time. I can't be the only person with this problem.

Thanks for supporting.

I have a hunch that the reason for the excessive space is that it is much easier to make it look good.

I'm really good with frontend, but I only have quite limited design training. I can whip out a good non-dense layout pretty quickly.

On the other hand, pretty much every (good) information-dense layouts I ever worked with had to be properly designed by a professional.

Maybe the reason for that is just fashion, I'm constantly informed by what I see and it's easier to replicate, whereas something that "breaks the rules" needs a better professional.