SoraNews24 (nee RocketNews24) has been like this since 2008, with basically no change in the article style, so yeah, it's a descendant of the 2000s Internet. Glad it's still going strong without changing.

I immediately thought of old school blogs in the 2000s when the page loaded. No annoying clickbait titles, memes, or reaction gifs, just personal reporting with short paragraphs and plenty of photos.

I once read that one of the reasons behind very straightfoward page layout on Japanese websites is a legacy of the internet-on-phone data services, screen sizes, and reading experience in the years before 2007/2008+, when the iphone and then android devices came out.

Japan had its own domestic ecosystem of IP data to phones and web browsing 2006 and earlier, but page rendering features were very rudimentary, and you had to keep the total data transfer sizes down or nothing would load properly.