I think they use another definition of "small" than most of tech-oriented folks here at HN. They don't seem to be interested in filesizes, number of requests, or even usability. They used a WYSIWG builder (see their advertisement somewhere else in this thread), which is responsible for all of the bloat. It looked good on their (fruity?) devices, and they went with it. It doesn't look like anyone with a technical sensibility was ever involved.
The whole sentence could use some more punctuation marks, like so:
A large number of young people across different countries are affected, with considerable impact on health care systems and society as a whole. Since spread via social media is no longer restricted to specific locations such as local communities or school environments, spread via social media is no longer restricted to specific locations such as schools or towns.
The second sentence both says the same thing twice and actually doesn't make any sense when you parse it.
> Since spread via social media is no longer restricted to specific locations such as local communities or school environments, spread via social media is no longer restricted to specific locations such as schools or towns.
The sequence "spread via social media is no longer restricted to specific locations" appears in exactly that sequence twice in that sentence. If you cut the redundancy down to "spread via social media is no longer restricted to specific locations", that doesn't make sense either since social media was never restricted to specific locations.
I'm not saying it's definitely written entirely by GPT, but mindlessly repeating sequences is very GPT-like behavior. Maybe academics are using GPT to pad their word count? Or maybe the authors and their editors just need more coffee?
Actually, they have quite a lot of additional links to further reviews/features about the book here: https://www.tcj.com/the-egg-a-symbol-of-life-this-weeks-link...