It's human-interest style writing. Western, particularly North American, audiences strongly prefer this kind of scene-setting prose prior to information exchange. I am also not particularly a fan of it. In the past, you had to endure it. Nowadays, you can select for your own degree of expertise and terseness by feeding the prose into an LLM and prompting it appropriately. Therefore, complaints of this sort of writer-audience mismatch are no longer of use. Use the tools available to you to solve your problems.

I used Opus 4.8 to avoid Fable guardrail hair-trigger, but you can use ChatGPT as well.