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Is that a feature or a byproduct? It doesn't make sense to me on the surface that a larger text would be linked to more necessarily.

The length of a text doesn't seem like it would factor into the outcome of the page ranking unless I'm missing something.

How would you determine what is a "good" or "bad" article, given a reader's preferences rather than one that simply gets associated most regularly with a search query?

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As I understand it, Google (and others?) rank pages higher if the time spent on them is high. Long text takes longer to read, so it's a way to increase that metric.

Another explanation I've seen is for ranking longer texts higher is that longer text is assumed to be of higher quality because it's more content/took more work to produce/whatever.

Whatever the reason, this leads to the rambling articles I mentioned, which seems to be a trend even for cases when the actual useful content is short.

Such is the logic but, in reality, a long-winded article is just as likely to have folks heading for the back button in no time at all?

Yes, in practice the user will either get angry for having to dig for the useful stuff or simply give up.

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