Yes, it is really harder to use! The use case here is "user reads the text", not "user with large screen reads the text". I click on the link on my phone and I can't read the text. Even with pinch-zoom to fill the screen, I can still only sort of read the text. If I must gain expertise with the stylesheet of a site in order to manually re-style it to fulfill its primary use-case, then that site is very hard to use.
I'm not even arguing with the theory here. Proxying gopher text files to a simple text-based website is a really nifty idea, but this implementation has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. An implementation of this that conscientiously picks and chooses web platform features that aid in usability (for instance, perhaps responsive layout and typography) while rejecting those that are unnecessary for this use case (perhaps javascript) would be neat.
I'd argue that a client purpose built for viewing this kind of raw-text content with formatting to fit the user's preference is better - and defaults as you describe.
That said, the enforced BRs are silly.
I'm finding as I move more and more to a CLI for every day tasks, things like gopher and plain-text web sites are much more accessible to me. Part of my response above comes from a desire to see a simple, consistent means of providing textual documents with minimal requirements or assumptions about what makes something useable for people.
