I don't think that's true, at least not for "people" as a whole group. For me, paywalls are a pain because I don't want to jump through the hoops to get past them, and you're often stuck ordering a full subscription or the like (as well as other posters rightly pointing out that paywalls can often come prior to any ability to decide that you WANT what's paywalled).

If there was a truly low friction way to get a single piece of vetted/high quality content for a marginal one time rate (the sort of thing I used to hear from a lot of the bitcoin crowd as a potential use case, but only saw materialize in partial forms via things like dogecoin) I'd be much more likely to do so. (or if you're feeling generous as a content author, a low friction way of donating post-factum; the "paypal button" (and similar) is not a great solution as is due to aformentioned high friction)

tl;dr, it's still neither common nor easy to be able to transfer small sums for specific content. This is a model I'd support over both ads and current-form paywalls.

This post had too many qualifiers, which I think indicates it's clearly not cut and dry, but I worry that to paint a broad brush of "nobody wants to pay" distracts from finding a model that will work better.