It is theft, plain and simple. Someone makes something, owns the property, they have the right to determine under what conditions they sell it. I always find it hilarious how people defend piracy with arguments about making products more user friendly/cheaper and so on.
If you don't like something, don't buy it. If you're bypassing payment without the owners permission, you're stealing.
Bypassing a HTML element is not 'stealing', its reformatting remote data. They are sending the article in the reply to the request, and messing with the formatting. If they did not want you to read the full text, they would not allow an unauthenticated users to access the text.
I always find it hilarious how the strong IP bullies like to reinforce the status quo, empowering the powerful and cursing the weak.
Property rights in particular protect small and independent creators who rely on the fact that people pay for their products. Large studious can generally eat the losses of piracy, independent developers cannot.
This is why today they're forced to either two things. Build proprietary products that make theft impossible, or live on donations and capture only a fraction of they value they produce.
Everything else is coercion. I do not subscribe to your flavor of authoritarian strong IP.
The publisher didn't pay them in order to give it away for free.
If you start using digital lockpicks to pick their digital lock, and consume their content without paying, they have lost the revenue haven't they?
(Cue "they're not entitled to revenue for intangible goods", and other libertarian arguments that are internally cohesive but not accepted by the public)