I recall reading that shorter columns of text help people to read faster and raise fact-retention, because it brings the entire body of a line into a single eye

I recall reading that shorter columns of text help people to read faster and raise fact-retention, because it brings the entire body of a line into a single eyespan. Even without speed reading skills, you can typically read thinly columned text quickly. I'm not sure if that has anything to do with why a site would choose this layout style, and there's clearly a lot of extra cruft that just distracts from the content. Probably enough to obliterate the gains. But I wouldn't be surprised to find out that some consultant or designer or developer told them thin columns of text had upsides.