alt Hacker NewsThis type of layout - short or 1 sentence paragraphs - has been around since the early days of the web.
An early proponent was the BBC news website, and you can see they still adopt this style.
The BBC found that breaking up text in this way made it easier to read on a web page.
News is the ultimate in thin writing, by definition.
I think the article would've been improved by varying sentence structure and paragraph length. There is a time and place for short paragraphs, and they do make things easier to read. However, the whole point the article is making is that many things that are worth doing are not easy, and many things that are easy are not worth doing. It's explicitly advocating for people to engage with the world around them, even if that means they have to face the possibility of changing themselves.
Long-form paragraphs are exactly that: harder to read, but they invite you to grapple with the material that's being written.