Paywalled sites (particularly news/media sites) are playing at a messy game here. It’s similar to the free vs paid music. In the radio-records day, free radio play drove record sales revenue. Ideally they would sell records to anyone willing to pay, but give music away to anyone willing to listen. In the actual world, you can’t do this perfectly so you need another way for free & paid to co-exist. Once the medium changed to digital, all the rules get thrown out. Attempts to force digital to play by radio-&-record’s rules have been a slog.
Many internet generations ago news sites were mad at Google for showing ads alongside their headlines on news.google. They even got some lawmakers to agree. Google offered to de-index them. Stalemate.
Similar issue here. News sites want paid subscriptions if they can get them, so paywall. They also want the readers who won’t pay, so no paywall.
Overall, I think paywalling is a semi-dead end. I don’t mean that it won’t work for any site, but it’ll probably be a niche revenue source like a print-only publication. Most news sites want to be part of the greatest, most relevant discussions. Those happen on the internet as a whole, not inside walled gardens. This mess free for some, paid for others mess is to much of a kludge to be the model.