Just under 7,000 words, the first three of which are "The long read".

This identifies the piece as being long-form journalism, even without reading the text. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-form_journalism .

> Long-form journalism is a branch of journalism dedicated to longer articles with larger amounts of content.[1] Typically this will be between 1,000 and 20,000 words.

It's literally called "The long read", you can't really be surprised.