I can't tell if I am paranoid, but why do articles like this sound it was written with ChatGPT with minor edits?

You're not paranoid. ChatGPT has a really obvious format. If I could bold text on HN (not that I think I want that), I could do an even better impersonation:

I am a 3-sentence paragraph giving a high level overview of the topic. This is the second sentence, which starts to fill in a little more detail about the topic. And the purpose of this sentence is to introduce the sub-topics and bullet points I'm about to provide.

Brief sub-topic title

1. Bold Word - A short, snappy sentence about the first item.

2. Bold Word - More of the above, about the second item.

3. Bold Word - Again, a snappy description of the third item.

Brief second sub-topic title

1. Bold Word - A short, snappy sentence about the first item.

2. Bold Word - More of the above, about the second item.

3. Bold Word - Notice that all these descriptions fit on one neat line.

4. Bold Word - Four items is the longest list you're likely to see.

This is the “tell” graf for me:

> Search engine bots are impatient. They want to see your content NOW. With SSR, your pages are ready to go when the bot comes knocking — no waiting around for JavaScript to load and render.

The tone is just completely out of nowhere, but sounds exactly like what happens when you tell 4o to spice things up a bit.

The Pendulum Is swinging back ....

I find that SSR really only applies to a narrow band of use cases. Specifically, SEO optimization. In almost all other cases, it seems like client render is a better choice.