The same patterns have been running for a decade. A celebrity does something normal. The headline screams "gone too far". A movie gets a mixed review. The angle is "fans are furious". A throwaway line from an old interview gets dug up. The framing is "exposed".
These headlines work because they exploit a gap. The gap between what the audience expects and what the headline promises. You click to see if the promise is real. It never is. The article is five paragraphs of nothing with a quote from a random tweet.
The cycle feeds itself. Outlets need traffic. Traffic comes from outrage. Outrage comes from misrepresenting normal behaviour. Normal behaviour is boring. Boring does not get shared. So the misrepresentation gets more extreme.
What keeps it working is the audience's willingness to be baited. Every click tells the algorithm this format works. The algorithm amplifies the format. More outlets copy it. The baseline for what counts as newsworthy drops.
The only way to break the pattern is to stop clicking. But the pattern is designed to make you click. The headline is crafted to trigger a reaction before your rational brain can intervene. That is why it keeps working.
Paul