Even if you make payment as completely frictionless as possible, there is still the mental overhead of deciding to pay. As the dollar amount gets smaller and smaller, the "pain of deciding to pay" becomes a higher fraction of the total pain, and the economics don't make sense. Plus, if you just charge for each click or whatever, you get the bad incentives of clickbait back.
Subscriptions are great because you only have to make one (big) decision. Subscribing to individual writers is great, because the thing you are deciding is do you like/trust/want to keep reading this writer, which is something that people actually do have strong feelings about.
As distribution has become free, the value of content has been driven to zero. But now the value of curation -- of reading somebody you trust -- gets higher. That's what people are willing to pay for.
But that's not how I read journalism. Many years ago, I subscribed to the local paper, The NY Times, and a few magazines. Now I browse forums and Google stuff.
I like many writers. So many that I can't imagine committing $x per week to each of them. As you say, paying per article leads to clickbait. But somehow, I'd like more flexible access to multiple writers.
I'd prefer to see a world where that happens bottom up -- writers choose to band together with other writers they trust. But we'll see :)
I love that idea!