I don't know your age but rest assured that when Anandtech started, and for the following 7-8 years, doing that was absolutely needed for a good user experience. Try loading a giant single page with dozens of images on a 28.8kbaud connection... It will not end well

Lol I read plenty of long articles on a 14.4kbps connection and have been around long enough to know you’re using baud incorrectly :-)

Without trackers and superfluous images, excessive CSS etc you could load a nice long article reasonably quickly. Text does not need to be split like that. It was done for $$$. Ars even offered a pagination escape hatch as a premium benefit at one point.

The print version concatenated all the pages. They did it to allow users to not load all the charts all at once.