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That may be true for countries with online payments that actually work, but keep in mind that for many third-world countries the jump from $0 to $0.001 is hard, since people often do not have any way to perform an online payment.

Yes, there needs to be an alternative.

Paywalls also have a negative effect in the linkability of the Web. If I suggest you to go to some page, and you have to pay for it, then independently if the price, I have a much higher responsibility for the content actually being relevant for you.

As it is now, whenever you recommend pages that host third-party ads, you may be pointing people at malware.

The cost is just not money, but also time. It takes some time to fill in payment information, even if only a minute, and even if only once per website.

Consider the huge ecosystem that has developed for serving ads. Each advertiser need not make arrangements with each site owner.