I disagree with the stated examples and literally quit reading there.

I can’t click on any links on pages (the header works).

Using brave on iPhone.

Firefox and Safari works…

Perhaps I am too much of a curmudgeon, but the example first sentence made me not care at all - not about Venice, but about the writer's approach, which seems to want to conjure breathless mystery about something I could easily look up on Wikipedia (or read in tl;dr comments in this thread).

It ISN'T Venice you need to make me care about, it's YOU! Why should I spend any of my time on you?

A good first sentence should make me care about your perspective, at least for non-fiction about subjects well-studied.

Fiction, obvs, differs. Scalzi's Old Man's War had such a great first sentence I devoured the series.

So how did Venice maintain its dominance?

And thus "question-bait" was born.

Part of the hook is asking a question. It immediately gets people investing in thinking of an answer

Probably should be marked (2025).

Expanding Gwern's well made point, just a little, is that writing of any length needs a thesis statement in the first paragraph or so.

Thesis statements are not a new techniques, and these days they are needed much more because there is so much to read. Many articles don't state their thesis at all or not for a long time.

I don't have time to read that far to find out if it's worthwhile to me. Unless you are Satoshi Nakamoto, I'm not going to read far to find out.

The author is right, I care a lot more about the Venice thing than reading the rest of the article.

Zeroth, proofread.