I really don't care for it either, mostly because the shitty JavaScript the site it plagued with takes a million years to load and half breaks the site. However, I think the sheer popularity of this format means that someone lies it, even if not me.
Search engines like it. That's the entire story.
There's good long-form recipe content, but nearly all of it's only there for SEO reasons. Most of these sites just make up the "genuine" stories so they have something for Google to chew on. No-one involved, reader or writer, cares about it, except search engines.
I wouldn't very much mind all the extra text if the JavaScript didn't interfere so much.