“…the reason why articles began to load so slowly is because of all the javascript in the background…some of [it] not for readers but for advertisers — admitted).”

We must visit different neighborhoods on this web. Where I go, 95% of the javascript serves advertisers’ and publishers’ interests, not mine. I know, because I ‘view source’ fairly often. (Many sites fail to load correctly when one takes measures to foil the trackers.)

So what you see as constraints on your ability to create I see as a beautiful decluttering. Getting back to the basics of text is a good thing. If readability is the goal, it is not surprising that sites are converging style-wise. But uniformity of appearance does not imply uniformity of content. At a glance, a page from a Harlequin romance looks just like a page from Hemingway. It’s the content, and its accessibility, that matters.