I'd say there's been long-form journalism that people have appreciated for a long time that describes people, places, life history, and the journalist's impressions. For example, Berton Roueché and John McPhee have both written well-regarded long-form science journalism in The New Yorker that touches on some of these sorts of things, and not just "TLDR; it was lupus" or "apparently, making an atomic bomb no longer requires the resources that it once did". Both of them prominently featured the people who were responsible for discoveries or investigations and tried to give a sense of their stories and their character.

But maybe there's a trend toward too much purple prose in journalism over time, or maybe people specifically want a place to find out about important new discoveries in a less biographic or experiential way that still doesn't require much technical background.