What is wrong with browser default styling, and why do browsers ship with something that is wrong?
Default styling looks terrible and is hard to read. Humans are good at reading columns at around roughly 80 characters, while browsers default to filling the whole width of the screen with text, resulting in a column that's hundreds of characters wide. Text also gets easier to read when more spaced out; the default line height makes the text too close together. Browsers still ship the bad defaults because changing de…
> Text also gets easier to read when more spaced out; the default line height makes the text too close together.
The opposite is easily true in my experience. Making text large, using ample line height, and even greater spacing between paragraphs, makes for text that is more readable but makes the experience of reading much worse. This is of course entirely subjective unless someone comes up with measurable evidence, like a study on the sentiment of users.
Something tells me that designers have been taking principles that are appropriate to hero page sections, advertisements, magazine covers and such, and applying them inappropriately to bodies of prose. Larger text with spacing and huge margins (or smaller max width) helps the reading impaired, but I don't really buy that people actually prefer it.