The commenter specifically used that tree of spans as an example of the horrible mess that is modern HTML. So it is necessary here to deliver the feature, and I think the broader point is that we might see a mess in the DOM inspector, but it is a requirement to deliver certain modern features in a productive way.
Like normal text on a page? No. For one very specific thing that it's useful for? Of course. If it wasn't useful for something it wouldn't exist, the issue is using it for things that it has no reason to be used for.
The code snippet seems like the only part where individual words are wrapped in their own divs or spans. It's not true that the whole article is like that. It seems like the article has reasonably semantic html elements present, just with minified CSS classnames and maybe a couple extra wrapping divs at the top.
I'm not the one who called out this site, and this one "OK" with its semantic HTML for the article content (though outside of that it has a bit more soup than it probably needs). It does render a bunch of stuff with JavaScript though so that's not great :(
