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Novella length makes perfect sense in the e-book market, less sense in the tradpub market. The Maigret series were seldom over 40,0000 words or so, and for the UK book market Penguin bundled two at a time to give a reasonable sized book for the money.
As a seem to recall, Simenon's Maigrets were originally marketed in cheap magazine format, although I've never seen an original French Maigret edition.
Another famous novella: Bonjour Tristesse, 29,000 words by my count. Bet you didn't realise it was that short. It doesn't read short, and I didn't realise myself it until I did a quick word count.
Patterson and the many others now in what might be called "group writing practices" are not new. Think of Dumas, who didn't write The Count of Monte Christo himself (or indeed any of his novels) but nevertheless closely controlled every bit of them. The man who actually did the quill-work later tried writing his own novels, which sank without trace.
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