This question was decided many years ago. The paywalls are annoying and suck, but HN would be far worse off without articles from NYT, WSJ, Economist, and similar publications. (Note: I'm not saying all their articles are good. Just some of them.)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
One of these years the publishing industry will get its act together and there will be an actual solution to this problem, but in the meantime, allowing paywalls that have workarounds and excluding paywalls that don't have workarounds is the local optimum.