Its really not, designers in publishing companies do not have final say. The publishers do.

These are established companies with existing management structures. The owners / management controlling the brands will have briefed in a designer to implement all of these elements.

There priority will be leverage the audience of esquire, to allow them maximise the sales they can do via media buyers.

Audience development for sites like these, is often only minimally effected by design. Especially considering these are established brands. They already get the numbers, they dont need to earn them.

Web designers are just the people paid to put the designs together options together for management to choose from.

You neatly skipped past the whole "making money" part of the OPs post. Esquire has a great print experience. It is packed with ads. You're just used to it, so you don't care. I very much doubt the lead designer of the print edition can dictate how many ads are in the magazine, or where they are.

Print ads don't have to be physically peeled off the page in order to read the content underneath. They don't cause the pages to fall out of the magazine when you flip them out of the way. They don't cramp the content into a postage-stamp sized corner of the page. They don't inline ads every third paragraph. The ads themselves don't roll around on the page or blink.

There's ads in the print magazine, but they're in a format that doesn't run into absolute conflict with the content.

The print ads rarely jump in front of the text, permanently obscuring it. It's baffling, but this is a real phenomenon on the mobile web.

It's not just a matter of getting used to ads. Print ads don't jump across the page and hide the text of an article after I start reading it.