Modern music albums aren't really written with that in mind in my experience. They're optimised for people skipping through playlists in a streaming service, not going on a journey through an album.
Heavily depends on the genre and the artist. A lot of top 40 pop albums are vehicles for singles or designed to get chopped up across some playlists, sure. If they bother with the album at all. I would definitely say bands that focus on holistic or even high-concept albums tend to do it often though, and obviously you see more of it in genres like progressive rock where it was kind of a defining mainstay, but it's a form that's alive and well in a lot of genres on a case-by-case basis. For example, I like a Russian pagan folk/black metal act called Arkona (which is pretty well-known by folk metal standards actually) and their latest album released last year is high-concept and cohesive, structured as a katabasis. I'll also warn that it's probably less for everyone than some of their other music as it's very musically gloomy and thematically dark, which makes sense given how things have been going in Russia and especially given the lead singer's family is from Ukraine... Point being, cohesive albums are far from a dying art form, they're just not the format most optimized for broad appeal and whatever monetization method is most favored by the largest distributors (these days probably Spotify and, what like, Apple?), which the most well-known pop music is by definition
It's worth considering that writing a cohesive composition that's roughly an hour long (even if broken up into a few different songs) probably takes more effort and vision than accumulating individual songs and eventually releasing them together, so you'd expect the latter to happen more often even in the absence of systematic pressures of other kinds
Also, obviously this permits a lot of degrees and can be kind of subjective. Like you can have a whole continuum from "This is one large cohesive opera or play broken up into songs for convenience or structure" to "These songs share some musical motifs or thematic ideas, possibly just explained by all being composed around the same time by the same artist" and the latter of which one listener might view as having a coherent thematic thread through it while another might view it as a bunch of barely-related singles. Often even just the year an album was released can make it a snapshot of the zeitgeist in a big way that sometimes only even seems that way in retrospect
I think a lot of music (especially pop) has always been this way to an extent -- a bunch of songs are written with no sequencing in mind, and then the "structure" of an album is built up after the fact by sequencing those songs in a way that sounds good. Like, I don't think "Please Please Me" by The Beatles was written with an intent to tell a story though the arc of the album (it almost feels random, if anything, although maybe the most popular song was put at the end on purpose?)
In all honesty, I don't think the ratio of "a bunch of tracks thrown together" albums to "narrative arc" albums is overall all that different than it used to be.
That's been true basically since the invention of sound recordings and radio. If you look back, producers really focused on building the best single, optimizing for radio play.
While I personally mainly listen to full albums, unless it's explicitly a concept album or a classical suite I'm not sure it's possible to make a broad generalization that "it's how the music was intended to be heard".
You can listen to any Kendrick Lamar album either starting from track 1 or last track and still can understand the storyline overall. Very genius. Maybe you should widen your genre? Also I could say the same thing with metal, hardcore or punk in today’s modern music.
Fortunately that's my preferred genre (prog). You'll have to pry Devin Townsend and Haken albums out of my cold dead hands (or just log me out of my Spotify account).
