I think some authors would prefer to get away from it, but the publishing market, even though it's slowly moving in that direction, isn't quite there yet. If you're shopping around a solid 75-page piece, it's too long for a magazine (or even most journals, if it's research), yet too short for a book. So you either chop it or pad it, usually.
A good compromise, I'd think, would be to divide the piece into modular components with a repetitive (or narrative) structure, and publish them serially as a sort of "miniseries" feature in a magazine. This is how many pieces of novella-length genre fiction were originally published, for instance.
