You know how a presenter asks questions on a topic where he is the expert? Same goes for this animation. It does not show but hide information to keep the reader engaged. I found myself guessing who will be first and boy was I wrong. My ego would have prevented me from noticing, if the chart would have been presented to me right away.

On YouTube you can see how well this works. There are channels with a huge follower base just existing because of this animation.

Not completely unrelated, the mechanical horse race game that used to be at The D in Vegas, and now is at the Linq (I think?) has a similar effect on the human psyche. As does gambling on most sporting events. Anything with a lot of ups and downs. I really started to think about this when I was developing casino games about 15 years ago. But the same is true with any game, or any future event. When an outcome is unknown, we experience time as a set of discrete emotional peaks and valleys - we experience an extra dimension of time, the high/low. Apart from being a highly successful design hook, I think it can be a really powerful way to encode information. Especially if you have time-referenced data and you've already exhausted the other axes or relative sizes you might use to convey your dimensions. Like, my main argument with using that "race" is that you could use the x-axis for something else, and have the whole graph change over time.

But you're very right that this indeed relies on an emotional component to achieve the full effect of conveying time in two dimensions. If there's no emotional attachment to the outcome, our brains don't process the highs or lows. In that case, a variance chart like open/close prices on the stock market might work better.

These channels don’t exist because it’s a better way to display information. It’s a more click bait way.

A chart that works that way is the title equivalent of “you won’t guess who wins”.

I get sucked into those “X over 50 years videos” and watch to the end to get the satisfaction. But it doesn’t help me remember the outcome at all.

It’s just engagement bait in video form. A chart on a webpage like this is just chart junk like the poster said unless it’s actually updating in real time.