It's really not a great design. It's just nerdy in a HN way. A great website would list projects in approximate order of importance/notability, would use the tiniest bit of CSS to make the text readable on wide screens, and would have images for projects with a visual component. The only reason his site is appealing is because you already know who he is.
I agree it's not the most pleasant site to visit. I understand peoples desire to move the web back towards simplicity/html only with no js. But a little bit of css does not hurt and would make simple sites like this a lot more enjoyable to look at. Just my opinion..
I am on a 27" 4k screen and that website is very readable to me. Should the text all be in a single column in the center taking 10% of the screen like 99% of blogs now?
Chronological or Alphabetical sorting would make more sense than importance.
Anything above ~1000px is considered difficult to read, yes. For example, the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines require that the site at least provides a mechanism to set the width to 80 characters, or about 1000px at a standard font size: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#visual-presentation
You can push it if you want to maximize horizontal space utilization - the site you're on right now, for example, caps reflowing text to about 1200px - but reading is easier when you have to scan over less horizontal distance, and there's literally no reason not to set some max-width.
> A great website would list projects in approximate order of importance/notability
Why?
I imagine they're suggesting that so someone who lands on the page and is unaware of Bellard can immediately know what he is (famously) known for instead of having to scroll through the long list of projects.