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 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.