The author's complaint(s) stem from the ads that "just keeps downloading" which in approximately five minutes downloaded "almost half a gigabyte" worth of information.

This is a prime example of why many people use adblockers, it's not just to make the majority of the web actually usable, but it prevents excessive data transfers that we never asked for. For what it's worth, the same article is just a hair over 8MB when ads are blocked and a hair over 9MB when you scroll down (loading the thumbnails for the other articles).

"misconfigured" as in no adblocker? ;-)

Sounds like the author is running the same browser configuration as the vast majority of internet users.

While I use ad-blockers and the like, I know I’m far from the norm.

Disabling Privacy Badger, reloading the site and scrolling around a bit, I can comfortably stay that the author is wrong, the site is much larger. Within two minutes the site has now transfered 50MB (of 75MB) according to Firefox, but it does indeed keep going, constantly loading more and more stuff in the background.

I left that page open in Firefox on macOS (no ad blockers) and after five minutes the network devtools panel showed me it had hit 200MB transferred, 250MB total from over 2,300 requests.

Post a network recording of that page loading from a code start on your machine. I’ll believe chrome devtools.

5 min in, after only scrolling to the bottom of the article:

4300 requests, 238 MB downloaded

With Firefox and all extensions disabled