I agree with you but that's none of my point.

My point is just that you have to weight the cost: it provided tremendous value through the system of journals, while not really giving a "real" drawback since everyone in research who has ever wanted to get a given paper in the past 5 decades has been able to find it despite the locking by trying hard enough to bypass it.

i don't even understand the downvotes: i don't agree with the system and Elsevier can die but my point is just that they never were a really tangible "problem". Mostly a "1rst world problem".