This is a weird aside, and almost certainly not your problem since it sounds like you're using Wayland, but for anyone else reading, I had slow start up times with alacrity myself, and sometimes getting a blank window, and it turned out to be a problem with xserver providing weird numbers for my monitor when it tries to figure out DPI, and `WINIT_X11_SCALE_FACTOR=1 alacritty` solves it.
Best I can figure its not really a winit/alacritty bug, but some gremlin with my particular monitor/gpu/nvidia drivers.
I dislike pagination, honestly, and find the scrolling effect a little too jarring.
However the scrolling effect DID actually remind me of my own natural behaviour. I tend to either randomly selecting and unselecting the paragraph I'm focusing on, or highlighting the first paragraph and holding the mouse button down, to incrementally select the text on a page as I read it/scroll.
At first glance I could maybe see myself enjoying this scroll effect minus the pagination, where the text still scrolled upwards but the page had a 'reading line' near the top that showed content above it dulled.
Best I can figure its not really a winit/alacritty bug, but some gremlin with my particular monitor/gpu/nvidia drivers.