The first minute of every article like this one is also torture. First it seems like the page loaded and you can start reading, but then you are going to be hit with a massive, all encompassing pop up covering the page. If you're lucky, it's a cookie consent modal, to which you basically
have to consent; the other case is a paywall and the content might never have been there to begin with.
You can brave the elements (the DOM elements) or zap away annoying modals, and if it's a paywall you might find an archived linked in the comments (thanks to anyone sharing these by the way) but either way you are in for a jolted start. If you are really in a hurry you might just bite the bullet and accept all cookies, muttering quotes from 1984 in the process.
Then there are the autoplay videos, good luck finding the X button on those, and have fun actually clicking one.
It's been an annoying first minute but you can finally start reading, only that every paragraph break is now an ad to something else, a focus grabbing div to additional content on the site, or - my favorite - another autoplay video completely unrelated to anything. Aside from videos, most of these are still present even in reader mode, for the clever reader.
Ad blockers help with some of these issues, but media articles today are just a total crapshoot, unless it's a personal blog, although those might turn out to be a marketing funnel for something, and oh why don't you sign up to our newsletter for the actual content we baited you into clicking, which in turn is an ad for the class they are promoting.
I envy the younger people online who never knew the internet before it became this weird annoying minefield of attention traps and poorly disguised marketing ploys.