I had the opposite reaction. The design uses grids which are worse than lists for scanning.
There is a study (or statistics, at least) that showed a row layout made the user actually see _every_ product in an online shop while a grid view made the user skip many.
I intuitively agree about the reduced scannability, but do you happen to have a link to the study? I tried searching for it to no avail.
I haven't been able to find it again. I'll update if I do.