It's not just the prose but article's structure that seems to have an AI-suggestive weirdness. Wikipedia's history of the raincoat [1] gives a sort of reasonable narrative of water resistant garment's through the ages. The main is that the Mackintosh and other innovations weren't the start of raincoats but versions of raincoats that arose with mass production. Mass production often doesn't make better things but it can make adequate things available to more people.
Even more, googling the history of waterproof garments, I found a variety of product catalogues and a museum brochure [2] that gave a "history" similar to the article. My guess is these are shallow histories of products (Mackintosh, Gortex, etc) and they all copied each other (manually) and then AI copied the narrative (automatically).
But more than copying the narrative, the article tries to make this haphazard narrative into something more systematic. But there is where the rhetorical structure actually starts to strain.
And the last paragraph about waxed coats is distinctly bizarre: "The waxed cotton coat was not a technical solution. It was a cultural one, a garment that said something about who you were and how you spent your time, that happened to keep you reasonably dry while you were doing it. " In late 19th century Britain, the class system didn't involve anyone signally that they spent time fishing in an open boat (maybe 2020's US has wealthy MAGA type who want to impersonate rawboned sons of toil but that can't be project view back to the past).
And yes, the prose is more jarring the more closely you read the text.
And jeesh, tearing apart a text that was likely automatically generated in the blink of an eye might show defense beats offense these day (and damn, it's hard to avoid these AIism myself). But at least it gives insight into crazy stuff that can even reach the top of hn.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raincoat
[2] https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/textiles-and-fashion/a-very-brief...