Yeah the article stub doesn't link to the article. It links to a login flow with the article id. If you go directly to the article you get redirected if you don't have a session.
It's incredibly easy to make an impossible to get around paywall. Porn has done it since the Internet existed.
In this very particular situation I'm glad most companies are lazy and stupid.
I don't particularly care if a company does pay only content. I think its legitimately ok. I hate companies that don't make you pay enough for the service to cover their costs thus leading to complete enshitifaction.
It's incredibly easy to make an impossible to get around paywall.
Sure, but the easily-bypassed js method makes sure it’s still crawlable by search engines, which is a trade well worth making where I work. Doesn’t matter as much for porn sites since the title and description aren’t the content most people are there for, so you can expose them on the paywall page.
Maybe they have a way to unblock major search engine crawlers but block it for everyone else now? I know Cloudflare was doing something similar for some bot protection mechanism, and this seems like something news outlets would want to do also.
Brave browser has a filter to bypass paywalls. Works on desktop and mobile versions. Definitely works on NYT as I just read something there today. And of course has built in adblock. You can also add additional filters and adblock lists.
Bonus: print to PDF in Brave to share an article with someone else. It retains all the graphics relevant to the article and cuts all the junk and ads out too.