The reason is people will click on them thinking it is an interesting story. The publisher (ESPN/Yahoo/etc.) just care that you click on the page so the ads load and they get the impressions. Some PM probably ran some analysis that machine generated articles from a stats table will get X number of clicks which will generate Y dollars in ad revenue. There was likely no consideration that the overall content of the site would decrease. After awhile people stop clicking on them because they know it will be a machine generated article so eventually the publisher will stop putting them on their website.
I think the industry term for this is "made for advertising content".
The PM or whosever's idea it was: "we don't do long-term experiments so nobody can prove it is ultimately destructive and imma be outa here next year anyway".
Who even reads these articles? Does anyone get benefits?