Normally I can ignore it, but the font on this blog makes it hard to distinguish where sentences start and end (the period is very small and faint).
It's always useful to check oneself and know that languages are constantly evolving, and that's A Good Thing.
It's not a new trend, I'm surprised you never noticed it. It dates back to at least a decade. It's mostly used to signal informal/hipster speak, i.e. you're writing as you would type in a chat window (or Twitter), without care for punctuation or syntax.
It already trends among a certain generation of people.
I hate it, needless to say. Anything that impedes my reading of mid/long form text is unwelcome.
Probably due to social circles/age.
> I hate it, needless to say.
It certainly invokes a innate sense of wrongness to me, but I encourage you (and myself) to accept the natural evolution of language and not become the angry old person on your lawn yelling about dabbing/yeeting/6-7/whatever the kids say today.