I literally closed the window because of this as a reflex to knowing ill have a poor reading experience - surprised me.

Agreed 100%. With a single scroll I was at the bottom of the page. Overriding scroll behavior is so obnoxious and unnecessary. Scrolling works fine; there's no problem to solve.

I read the front page using https://www.fullhn.com/ and it avoids problems like this

Try this extension, as soon as a site use obnoxious js just hit the toolbar button and it disables all js. Works like a charm.

https://github.com/maximelebreton/quick-javascript-switcher

I use https://gist.github.com/oxguy3/dda7958f7da766eed9fa

Not sure if it works on this specific site, but it helps in many places