I find the new trend of long form articles infuriating. Just get to the point, without all the rigamarole! Is there an actual benefit? Or is it just something people say?
The thing about the five-paragraph essay is its structure scales well to longer articles. You state your main idea up front, then spend a bit of time elaborating on that main idea, then you wrap up. Online articles are like -- they pick a source, say, a college professor or someone with a new book out. Then they spend half the article or more talking about their source's early childhood, failed marriage and/or relationship with their dog, anything that might have a loose tenuous relationship with the main idea. THEN they hit you with the main idea, then they pad out their essay with quotes from the source, whom by now you have "gotten to know". It's infuriating, but I guess the idea is to tease a main idea with the headline, then keep you slogging through barely relevant detail long enough to show you quite a few ads before wrapping up with stuff that relates what was teased to you, even if the body doesn't justify the headline. Clickbait, in other words.
When I want people to summarize links they post, it's not because I have a short attention span or categorically refuse to read them. It's because I want to know the broad sketches of what it's claiming so that I know whether I need the extra detail (sorry, "color") it provides vs. whether it's citing a study or argument I'm already familiar with (or is even a relevant point to make).
Try paying for something that's behind a hard paywall and you'll see shorter articles.