You are not the only one. I generally despise it, as it often delays getting to points that could have been made as effectively but more succinctly. I think narrartive storytelling has its place, but it's way overused, and I see it in many articles that simply don't warrant it, like ones about current events. If the first paragraph starts out with some kind of "it was a dark and stormy night" narrative, my eyes just glaze over. I want to be informed, not read a novel. I only have so many hours out of my day to learn something, and I hate to have that time wasted by fluff.
I get that, and I don't necessarily hate it here. I just don't prefer it in general, and particularly hate it when the style ends up in articles that simply don't warrant it. The fact that the long read articles are often distributed as podcasts makes a lot of sense, now that you mention it.
Same here. This "it was a dark and stormy night" style is bad writing. I read a lot, I like reading novels. This is just an empty structure. In this particular case the bad writing almost killed an interesting subject.
