I’m a visual designer, tricks like this are often used to increase legibility.

Like how the brain scans the first and last alphabet and guesses the word with a blurry sense of what’s in between. It helps cognition.

This pattern will help the eyes jump from one word to the next and older people will have an easier time following through the sentence.

Ofcourse the actual reason here could be different, since that can be done with even less effort.

I’d never get past this. If a website forced this on me I’d probably stop using it, otherwise I’d just override it with CSS.