I find that this is fairly normal for Axios: mechanically, an article will look like a kind of executive summary of a phenomenon or event but editorially it has a very confrontational argumentative style. It's been getting worse in the last year and I have to assume it's because the editorial org, like that of many other outlets is pushing for LLM use by its writers.
Axios style and LLM style are sort of indistinguishable so it's hard to tell, but yeah it does kind of look like this guy fed some links and quotes into an LLM and it made up a narrative to fit.
