I used the DOM inspector in my browser to delete. I barely noticed I was doing it. There are so many shitty layouts out there, I frequently tweak them to make them readable out of near instinct.
To my shame, this hadn't actually occurred to me. Duly done. Though I don't like that it came to that.
Not that I want to defend it but could you elaborate what exactly is so awful about it that it distracted you from reading the article. I didn't event notice it myself.
I'm going to guess the same thing that made me hate it: it covers up the first few letters of about 10 lines in the middle of the window.
I see a vertical bar floating over 15 lines of the body text. I found it annoying to scroll the page to read around the thing.
Here's a screenshot with my browser open at the size I'm comfortably browsing the rest of the web with. When I went back to check I could in fact expand the page and push that off to the left, which is less annoying, but still not great.
You can always remove it in the inspector. Perhaps this kind of nonsense merits a bookmarklet? I wonder whether this would fix many websites (I'm thinking AllRecipes?).