In my field, almost no one really buys paper journals. I think it's mostly a matter of tradition at this point. However, PDF does also mean the author gets cont

In my field, almost no one really buys paper journals. I think it's mostly a matter of tradition at this point. However, PDF does also mean the author gets control over what the document looks like. Of course it's possible to produce similar quality work using HTML, but many authors and publishers are just so accustomed to the existing stack that a lot of it is tradition. Fortunately, it's becoming fairly common for IEEE to provide HTML versions of papers generated from the LaTeX source that are single column. They're not perfect, but they can be a nicer reading experience in some cases. Personally, if I'm doing any serious paper reading, I'm often doing it on my reMarkable so I like a nicely formatted PDF.