You probably haven't noticed it before because when it's done well, it's a subtle and pleasant effect that can be used to draw your attention to particular elements on the page.
This site is intentionally doing it very poorly to make a point. Really, the takeaway should be don't do things poorly. But that's kind of obvious.
Fade in in scroll will always be slower than the reading speed of a significant percentage of population.
This becomes worse for people who just skim content, re-read the text, or want to quickly scroll to a specific place in text
Not doing it at all would be better still. It's really annoying.
Yes, if you make things only slightly worse it's better than if you make them a lot worse. But neither is quite as good as not deliberately making things worse.
> when it's done well
It's always awful. This site is exagerated in degree, but in kind it's merely on the scale of awful.
Computers should not waste my time. Even if eyes are 10ms faster than the awful fade, if a million people see it, that's almost three hours of human life down the drain.
And when scrolling fast, or far, it's not uncommon to have it waste a second of human time. A million of those is 38 human working days, just flushed down the toilet, because someone wanted "pleasant".
It's fantastically disrespectful of other people's time.
The web is already slow. No need to deliberately spend effort to make it even slower.
> when it's done well, it's a subtle and pleasant effect
I've seen it quite a lot, but apparently I've never seen it done well. It's a very annoying effect that chases me away from the site using it.