Your opening comment is an interesting viewpoint, and, in particular, you have made an interesting choice of adjective, as it is one that ascribes intent. If I am understanding the Wayback Machine correctly, this page has been essentially like this at least since February 2002, yet it would seem that its author was acting in a hostile manner by not anticipating the limitations of modern reader apps - or perhaps the site administrator is at fault, for leaving it out there as a trap for an unsuspecting modern app user?
looking past this, I see that the passage you quote is indeed insightful.
Hmmm re-reading my comment, it does seem to put blame on the page. However, I wouldn't expect relic of the past to be changed or maintained (cost obviously). It just came as a surprise that big wall of text couldn't be parsed by modern apps.
I expected modern parsers to be more clever. This article is a table like many webpages were in the first decade. Wondering how we can improve readability of such pages? May be the size of raw text ratio or something clever that considers how the page is rendered and extract key information.
I didn't have issues with it and by no means is it the most egregious of the 90s - it was just designed for more or less fixed CRT assumptions. It would be say 800x600 or so as a screen.
While smaller in resolution the screens were at least about a standard sheet of printer paper and almost square.
I have gotten into a masochistic retrogames on Linux with minimal support and you see a lot of things that need emulation because design assumptions that were no brainers didn't hold long term back when Moore's law also applied to clock speeds and multicore was really niche.
looking past this, I see that the passage you quote is indeed insightful.