I think your definition of storytelling is too narrow. When I took “storytelling” as a university class 20 years ago it had nothing to do with having moving parts on a website, but the concept is the same for both this article and interactive articles. Storytelling is simply a tool that enables you to tell and present a long story in a way that that makes people read all of it. I’d say this article succeeds as much as that as an interactive article would.