Totally true, but I think that's not what's happening. Yesterday an HN post was made about this https://lithub.com/the-wolves-of-stanislav-an-improbably-tru... It's carefully written to be like that, it's verbose by design, and I started skimming then closed it. I don't know why these timewaster articles are produced either, but it's not accident or laziness. Plenty irritating though.
You may be correct, but considering the author's long career and standing, you should consider the possibility that the issue here is your personal taste rather than the merits of the writer.
Print media editors necessarily have to constrain length, and authors learned to write accordingly. Nowadays, a lot of writing is unconstrained either by physical limits or editors.
The specific example you give appears to be intentionally literary in intent, and so conciseness is not necessarily a prime virtue. When authors were paid by the word, prolixity was effectively encouraged, and this is obvious in some of Poe's work.
"it was a sunny May afternoon in the office of Dr. Whoever, where the cobblestones in the entrance glinted the fading sunlight. When Dr. Whoever was a boy, his father would take him out fishing..." ... and rambles on with meaningless details, containing perhaps a handful of passages in the article that are actually relevant to what the title promised me.
Perhaps a clearer example is when you find a recipe online. You will find pages of how the recipe has been in the family for ages, and how the author's family is delighted with it, and the innumerous and unproven health benefits it has, and how it's so easy to make, etc. The actual recipe is half a page.
Then there's the old aphorism: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
We want to claim that style obfuscates content. However, simplicity can also be a style that obfuscates content by its nature, just as much as any other, maybe sometimes more than any other.
Maybe the problem is we want to implicitly assume that communication styles are simply accretions around the true message which exists in non-physical being, and if we could just 'read minds', everything would be perfect, and as with Gnosticism, the 'Truth' gets weighed down with the sin of physicality (wrapped up in words in this case). So we try to be verbal ascetics, throwing our sentences, rather than our bodies, in the ovens to strip flesh. When in reality the words do not convey like boxcars carrying grain, but are the thing in themselves and solely such. So maybe this ends up back at a kind of radical materialism, a world were nothing is backed by the pure truth of God (or, in this case, 'pure information').
The article you link to is obviously supposed to be a personal story told with some literary flare, not a concise journalistic report.
If you really lack this bare minimum of genre sensitivity then, well, no wonder you think there is a lot of bad writing.
Also sloppy literary self indulgences: "And whether they were there or not, I choose to believe in the wolves"
In other contexts such as actual physical survival, reality matters 100% and ignoring it can get you killed.
