interior page design patterns

Since the advent of the lonnnnnnng scrolling home page, I feel like there's been a surge of sites applying the same type of logic to the interior pages as well... lots of scrolling, no secondary navigation menu (if needed), lots of links to orphan pages with no visual indication in the global nav as to where that page exists in the hierarchy, lots of very stylized content that, because it's so broken up visually, doesn't really flow together to talk about a single topic. I thought that the fad would die out, but if anything I feel like I am seeing it even more these days. Almost like having an entire web site consisting entirely of landing pages that all kind of look similar. Obviously, some are quite well done, but I feel like I see more that are not.

And I guess it's worth adding that I've found next to nothing in the way of articles or any other online info regarding the matter... but maybe I'm not using the right terminology... "interior page"? "secondary page?

I know the days of interior pages consisting of a header and paragraph after paragraph of straight text are long gone (thankfully), but I've got to think that in most cases, this is a bit of overkill... to the point of shooting yourself in the foot. Or am I missing something? Is there data that shows that such complex structure for a page that is supposed to be narrowing down the focus are equally as effective?