It was very much the norm in formal and semi-formal gatherings. They didn't have conference talks with PowerPoint slide decks, their own equivalent was to read out articles or papers. This often extended to university-level lectures, in a practice that was arguably carried over from the middle ages as you mention, but was very much still in use.

> It's also very structured already.

It's definitely not very structured by modern standards. The length of paragraphs alone would be described as "wall of text". Again, this was an ordinary practice back in the day, aimed at saving costly paper and reducing the manual effort involved in physically laying out the work on the page. It was far from exceptional: to a first approximation, most texts from the early 20th c. or before will look like that.