Yet these companies do allow Google et al to index their stuff, otherwise the paywall bypass addons, archive.ph etc wouldn’t work. They want their cake and eat it.

Also you really can’t expect a user to subscribe to read a handful articles a month.

At least offer a once off small payment but almost nobody does that.

And I’ll bet you use adblock too (I sure do) making it even more impossible.

Yes though the tracking is the most important reason there. If they just used untargeted ads it wouldn’t be such a problem.