This is particularly bad in the food/recipe space. I've wondered if it's for SEO or if it's to stretch the content length of a short recipe and allow more spots for ads.
Always heard it may have something to do with copyright. You can't copyright a recipe (in the list of instructions sense), but you can copyright original prose/content.
Adding this stuff presumably makes it trickier for other sites to scrape/copy the recipe automatically, and lets them take down those who left the 'original' content in.
Alternatively, might be because of stuff like Yoast. Those tools have a 'readability checker' which might not class a simple list of instructions as 'easily readable'.
