He is expressing nostalgia for a time when information gathering had exciting new possibilities because of the internet was new, but before we over optimized the soul out of everything.

It's a slippery slope, because certainly the page could be more readable, and most people would want that, but then what's the next improvement? Sidebar links to similar blogs you might like?

But more to the point, I am pretty sure it is in reference to not being bloated with crappy JS spyware, no moving photos when scrolling, no ads, no subcribe popups, no 'you only have free 2 articles left', no overriding the f'ing text selection so i cannot copy paste code... So not medium.com basically.

I wonder though - for long-time coders like a lot of the audience here - have we become inured to reading monospaced fonts, such that we read them easier and are therefore an anomaly in such studies?

I know I cannot code at all with variable-width fonts, but is that because I'm old school and grew up coding in the Time Before when there were only monospaced fonts?