I'm partly not surprised this is happening. A lot of "Sesame Street" TV specials and several of the picture books work in a similar way. (There were some "Sesame Street" books that took on such a "magazine" format, like "Big Bird's Busy Book" from 1975, or "The Sesame Street Library/The Sesame Street Treasury" and "On My Way With Sesame Street" series.) The classic "magazine" format was starting to get a little dated as the 21st century continued. The classic format with the street story broken into several parts and sandwiched by various segments was also apparently supposed to emulate channel surfing or a regular network television block, with the segments being like "edutainment" commercials. Said format remained in use until after Season 32 (as even with the introduction of "Elmo's World" in Season 30, the rest of the format stayed the same). That was when they began to take on the "block" format with a single long street story kicking off the episode followed by the segments, including numerous frequent recurring elements like letter and number of the day sketches, "Journey to Ernie," "Global Grover," "Murray Has a Little Lamb", "Bert and Ernie's Great Adventures", "Abby's Flying Fairy School", "Elmo the Musical" (replacing "Elmo's World" until the Season 46 reformat), "Cookie's Crumbly Pictures/Smart Cookies/Cookie Monster's Foodie Truck", and "Sesame Street Nature Explorers". This was because little kids of the 2000s were found to respond better to such repetition. Plus, with the half-hour reformat introduced in Season 46, we already have a full 11-minute street story followed by some segments and then the five-minute "Elmo's World". But with this, we're now getting two such street stories per episode with a recurring animated segment in-between (or sometimes a two-part story).