alt Hacker News> what the fuck am I supposed to read next?
What a weird comment. You read whatever you want next, ever read a newspaper? You scan it all and pick the article you are interested in, then read that. I don't understand these comments, they work perfectly well in real life (and fixed size is arbitrary, I can make a super wide or super long newspaper too, the axis size does not affect this sort of layout, see infinite scroll for example, as there is only a fixed amount of content on the screen at any given time).
> You scan it all and pick the article you are interested in
Okay. What order am I supposed to scan in so I don't lose my place and accidentally skip a block? Scanning column by column gets me cut off partial boxes that I'll have to remember to check again later, while scanning side to side forces me to keep track of each individual block I've already looked at, as opposed to a single pointer to "this is how far I've scanned". Alternatively, I can scan roughly left to right, top to bottom and just live with missing some blocks. That's not ideal either, because hopefully if you didn't think I'd like to look at all of them you wouldn't have included them on the page.
You're right that you can make a newspaper that's really inconvenient to read, but you wouldn't, because the failure case you'd end up with is CSS Grid Lanes.