"Losing the War" by Lee Sandlin, about fading memories of World War II, originally published in 1997:
https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm
I re-read it every couple of years. It's a hazard to my time just pulling up the link again because it's so long yet compelling.
Some of these articles are definitely more about the author being able to say they write than it is shedding light on anything or providing any kind of insight. It's all just gross to me
It's an art form, and it's about exploring the people behind the ideas as well as the ideas themselves.
I used to love reading the Saturday and Sunday magazines that came with the paper, this was back in the 1990s. Many of those were always of this long form, rambling, structure.
If you can see the pattern it's obvious once you start reading.
There's a sort of teaser at the beginning. Then they dive into a person's history like this:
Super Bionics is an exciting new form of prosthetic that's revolutionising lives.
Steve Jones was sitting on his porch when he first thought of super-bionics. Steve had always been fascinated by robotics when he was growing up. At 3 years old.........
5 paragraphs later they'll finally do a bit more about the super-bionics.
Then each section gradually moves the story forward in exactly the same way. They intro the subject. They introduce a new person behind the subject and explore them and their motivations. Then they say a bit more about the actual subject.
You're mistaking a writing style with time wasting.
I don't have the patience for it any more, but lots of people do.
I read for work, but I also read in my spare time. I love reading about things that I know very little about. Books still generally live up to their synopsis and respect your time, if you choose them well. I mostly stick to books for my leisure reading.
Long-form articles have become like opening a box of chocolates in the Forest Gump sense. "You never know what you're going to get." That half-nonsensical title that somehow got you to click isn't going to be explained, clarified, or elaborated on until you're fifteen minutes in, and its a coin-toss if the article will even answer the questions it pretended to ask. The odds are high that the author will go off on a tangent and never return.
When you're baited into reading a rambling, unfocused longform article that has nothing to do with it's title, it often feels like you've been swindled out of your time. That's because you have been swindled. I heartily encourage people to use AI to produce abstracts of long-form articles before reading them. It's like installing an alarm system. Don't let long-form thieves steal your time.