Agree wholeheartedly. It's rare to find a website today that is so abjectly different than the rest of the web.
Abject =~ despicable
I find 'abject' an amusing adjective to apply. It makes one imagine the author writhing on the ground in despair after loading a standard website, and despondent - o tempora! o mores! - resolving to be different.
(Not entirely wrong, as it happens.)
It's a very cool format, for sure.
Scrolling through it quickly makes me feel like like I loaded a webpage that hasn't loaded images properly and show a little X icon instead.
There aren't any images, so I'm not sure what you mean. Are you referring to the sidenotes?
As an admittedly not very smart person, the sidenotes do create a very claustrophobic effect on me. Maybe it's different when one is reading the main article and glancing at the notes, but when randomly scrolling or pgdn-ing to skim the article, it's overwhelming.