There are many ways to decide to not read this writer, and they're all good!
Yeah, this paywall is both hard and niche. The normal tricks don't work, and I'm not going to pay ~100USD per year for a single random substack...
I think you would be shocked at how effective stupid techniques like this, and other marketing strategies, actually are.
I believe parent comment was referring to tools to bypass paywalls when they referred to the "normal tricks", like archive.org, archive.is, 12ft.io, manually setting a googlebot or other search engine indexer UA, clearing cookies, modifying the HTML of the page locally to remove hidden attributes or scroll locks, etc