I’m gobsmacked editors (especially Noleander) were able to bring this up to Featured Article status (promoted this year, so it’s not legacy when standards were more lax). If your instinctive response is that “it’s just an article about bridges; what’s the big deal?”, that’s understandable. However, articles about general topics are way harder to make into Featured Articles. I’ve written two FAs, and both are about very niche topics.

For niche topics, you have a practicably finite list of sources you can draw from, and finding them is usually relatively easy if the subject has a distinctive name. Therefore, you have give-or-take several dozen puzzle pieces you just need to figure out how to find, what information to take, and how to arrange. You can write something most people would consider essentially optimal given the extant material you’ve (at least nearly) exhausted.

For bridges, though, oh my god, I can’t imagine it. I’m not saying you can’t adequately summarize bridges within Wikipedia’s constraints; I’m saying that Featured Article standards and the people who scrutinize them are rough. There is so much (well-meaning and usually valid) nitpicking during the nomination process that writing to avoid and account for it must’ve taken so many hours of meticulous work. I’m sure it’s still improvable given such a general subject, but holy hell. Hats off.