The format of Paged Out! – the 1 page limit, the custom layout, are done on purpose. They have their downsides of course – exactly as you have pointed out. It has to be recognized, that so do the no-page limit / strict layout publications (and I am writing this as someone who has been cooperating with several technical magazines as both a reviewer/editor and an author over the last 15 years).
In a typical magazine authors feel the pressure to write long articles about everything, and they don't feel comfortable posting short notes on cute tricks. So Paged Out! is basically meant to fall into this 1-page niche where short notes on cute tricks can find a happy home.
Is this 1-page format limiting? Yes, it is. Can you write everything in this format? No, you can't. And that's OK.
We're not trying to be PoC || GTFO or Phrack (both of which are wonderful btw and I'm a huge fan of both; there's a lot of love flowing in the zine community btw - see e.g. DNS TXT records for pagedout.phrack.org and phrack.pagedout.institute). We just found our own niche of short articles to occupy.
As for the layout chaos – I understand what you mean. At the same time, this is another niche which I put PO! in on purpose. I sometimes joke that PO! is a therapy for me after having to squeeze my idea into the exact layout a publisher wants, or after reviewing too many waaay too long articles for another magazine.
This is to say: I recognize your points and I believe you are right. At the same time I'm pretty happy with this little flawed niche I found and put PO! in.
Two more links about these two points:
https://pagedout.institute/?page=faq.php#why-one-page
& https://pagedout.institute/?page=faq.php#layout