Quanta is amazing because it doesn't have to worry about money. It's a publication run by the Simons Foundation, funded with the proceeds of the wildly successful RenTec hedge fund. So they get pretty much full editorial control.

For other publications they are beholden to people who haven't figured out ad-block, and your bar needs to be pretty low to capture that revenue.

Remarkably, they don't even ask for money anywhere on the site. Now that is a rare thing on the modern internet, especially for high quality writing.