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I always was of the opinion it was a neat trick for lazy developers to limit traffic on mobile devices. But you are right, it is also very annoying and especially on a big site like TheVerge, they could have come up with better ideas...
Well, as for things I hate: Here in Germany we have a pseudo-tech site which always loads a banner to buy their premium after loading the real content. It is big, it is ugly, it is nearly neon green, and I can only see the topmost article and have to scroll down for more. The problem: Since it loads the banner later, the whole content just jumps away, which is very bad (we had some link for this anti-pattern here a few days ago). I cannot even block it. If I block that ad, they block the whole site for me :( So it is a mix of many annoying things in just one single banner. I really don't know, why I still frequent that site, since the articles are lacking, sometimes incorrect and lately even have improper language and offenses in them... Maybe just an old habit.
Other annoying behaviors include overriding of browser functionality (as seen here on Hashnode with middle-mouse-click; already told the team about it and they are working on it, so thank you!). I am used to certain behavior and if a site changes what I am accustomed to, the site feels a lot more annoying to use because I have to rethink my actions to achieve the behavior I actually want.
Overload of images, like on TheVerge. The mosaics look nice from a distance, but they make scanning the articles a pain. Unfortunately I have seen a few more news sites which use mosaic layouts with picturtures for news articles.
White background at night. 99.9999% of the websites do this wrong. It hurts my eyes when browsing, so I consider it very annoying. I use the Stylish plugin to darken sites I use regularly (like Google), but when opening another site, it really stings :(