I stopped playing Magic 25 years ago, but I think its history is definitely worth archiving for posterity. I hope somebody is going through and saving articles while they can, it would be a shame to lose that.
You are almost certainly correct and, further, it is likely the text represents almost 100% of the value.
There is no excuse for this buffoonish behavior. Just absurd.
There's so much history that gets lost for that reason: it's ephemeral, and nobody misses it at the time. It's hard to get people to think about what historians 500 years from now will be frustrated by not knowing. There's no immediate profit in it, we don't view it as all that important right now, and it's slightly inconvenient, so it'll probably just be lost to history.
If it’s that important, someone should scrap that, zip it and put it on a tracker.
Just email.