I am not sure. I think the bundling of content might have a positive side effect:
I think there is a lot of content that people love to consume (cat videos, food porn, sports, etc.), even if it is not particularly “worthy”, and vice versa content that is important or worthy, and that you might want to have (even if you don’t always want to actually consume it!), such as deep investigative journalism exposing misdeeds of the powerful, operas, what have you.
With bundles, like The Economist or any other newspaper, or TV channels, you can support or cross subsidise the latter with the former.
With micro payments, not sure that would work. It might lead to more clickbait.
It’s a bit like in the experiment where you could preorder your food at the work canteen for the entire week - people would pre-order a nice balanced healthy diet, while when you make the choice every day, you end up with pizza most days.
Or how people would buy the Encyclopaedia Britannica for home for a substantial amount, and then rarely if ever use it.
However, one thing in favour of micropayments versus ads: they allow you to support an article without having to read it…
TLDR: subscriptions and bundles might allow “the better angels of our nature” to support better and more valuable content than micropayments or ad financing.