What mechanism would make it possible to enforce non-paywalled, non-authenticated access to public web pages? This is a classic "problem of the commons" type of issue.

The AI companies are signing deals with large media and publishing companies to get access to data without the threat of legal action. But nobody is going to voluntarily make deals with millions of personal blogs, vintage car forums, local book clubs, etc. and setup a micro payment system.

Any attempt to force some kind of micro payment or "prove you are not a robot" system will add a lot of friction for actual users and will be easily circumvented. If you are LinkedIn and you can devote a large portion of your R&D budget on this, you can maybe get it to work. But if you're running a blog on stamp collecting, you probably will not.

Use the ex-hype to kill the new hype?

And the ex-hype would probably fail at that, too :-)

What does crypto add here that can't be accomplished with regular payments?