The long scroll is mostly a mobile problem wearing a desktop costume.
People want content, and on a phone the only direction available is down, so pages have gotten very long. The old argument about the fold is quietly going away, and I don't miss it.
But length was never really the issue. The issue is that deciding what matters is hard, and a long page lets you put the decision off. I want to tell a story about that, and I come out of it looking bad, which is the point.
A client once sent me two and a half pages of text to go into an advertisement six inches by six and a half. I did the arithmetic and told them plainly. We have room for maybe five words of headline, a dozen of body, and a call to action. Could we cut it down. They said no. It was a legal matter and a matter of preference, and they wanted every word in there.
So I put every word in there. I set the whole two and a half pages at a quarter of a point, so small it read as fine horizontal lines, and used it as a texture, a background. Then I pulled a headline out of it, and a line of body, and a call to action, and set those properly on top. Every word they sent me was in that ad. You could zoom in and read all of it.
They asked where the text was. I showed them, zoomed in. They weren't amused. They fired me, and they were within their rights to.
I had fun, and I was too coy by half. The design was clever enough. The conversation was a failure. What I should have done was sit down with them, show them what all those words would actually look like at that size, and let them arrive at the answer on their own. Show the consequence, don't spring it on people.
So let the page be long, if the content has earned it. But a long scroll isn't permission to stop deciding. And I keep that ad in mind whenever I'm tempted to be clever instead of clear.