Your comments

Agreed; when while reading an article/comments a notification comes in, that takes precedence and pushes the first article away. SUPER annoying!!

That is not how it used to be; it would be a (fairly accurate) count of unread notifications.  So obviously some “fix” made things worse or less useful, moreover since for me the count bubble never clears, it stays stuck at 1, even with all notifications read, and the only way to clear it —for me on iPad— is to swipe from the upper right corner the screen mirroring, and swipe it back.  Voila, count bubble gone.  Either reinstate an accurate counter or replace the “1” with something else.

And perhaps stop fixing what isn’t broken...

Same problem here, but on iPad.  Very annoying!

Why break what was working just fine?

Every notification or article has this problem; bug was introduced with the most recent update.  The bug couldn’t be more glaringly obvious; do you even test the app before releasing it?