Who are you to say what format a piece of journalism 'should have used'? You could apply your misplaced outrage about the 'Five W's' to any number of Pulitzer Prize winning long-form pieces from the last century.

In short, you appear to only be familiar with the mandated style for factual news-reporting - not for other journalistic output - and seem to think all deviation is in error.

Here's an example from one of the kings of the form - Michael Lewis - and his award-winning piece of financial journalism regarding the Greek bond crisis that nearly brought down the Euro:

https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2010/10/beware-of-gre...

If every article was in your preferred format, I would probably enjoy reading less.

Thankfully, there's a variety of writing styles, so that every one of us can find something we enjoy reading and skip the stuff we don't enjoy.

I don't see why you should be the sole arbiter of what writing style is allowed.

There are various kinds of news articles. This is what’s known as a feature article: in depth coverage of a particular topic. Those topics are not usually the daily headline stories and are not read-it-today urgent. If you don’t want to read features, don’t. There have been other articles on the topic.