> it's something that runs really long, with a lot of repetitions and
> personal opinions and anecdotes, with no real care as to style or syntax

I suspect middlebrow meandering may thriving because it is being rewarded by search engines. It results in a lot of “unique content” that isn’t commercial spam, and if you touch on enough different things at a passable level of quality, you increase the number of things that can trigger people to link back to you.

I’m not suggesting that this calculated, but it seems natural to write more of what gets one attention, especially when attention is monetizable