I mostly agree with you but do find it a fair point to suggest making it a straight-up paywall then. If they want some clients to pay for the content based on heuristic and black-box algorithms, that's going to be discriminatory, we just don't know to which groups (could be users from cheap connections or lower-income countries, could be unusual user agents like Ladybird on macOS, could be anything)

Huh? You have to login to Twit...er, X, Facebook, Insta, Snapchat, blah blah blah. After that, there's what 10% of the internet left. Seems like the open not-behind-paywall is the minority fo the interent