Additionally, much of the content I enjoy reading is produced by people not in it for the money, so there is no way to pay for it even if it did have monetary value to me.
If you pay for the whole pipeline, then the provider of that pipeline cares deeply about their brand. This gives them incentives to get the news right.
If you pay piecemeal (with money or eyeballs, doesn't matter), then the provider of that pipeline cares deeply about how effective the headline is at grabbing your attention. The quality of the article doesn't matter so much because it doesn't affect your buy decision. And what people don't care about, gets shortchanged.
The internet has caused us to move from a subscription model to a piecemeal model, and the quality of news has suffered. But this is not new. A hundred years ago the "yellow press" was also on a piecemeal model. So, more recently, were British tabloids. And they were crap in the same way that the internet news today is crap.
Unless you're either relying on a third party curation that you trust, or are purchasing the brand, quality is going to suffer.
If you could attach a frictionless transaction to a "Like" or "Kudos", I would be happy to pay $1 a pop or something reasonable for a well researched blog post after I've read it. Maybe not feasible for a wider public, but certainly might have niche acceptance.
Nobody has succeeded in making substantial money on a per item basis. However NPR manages to do it on a brand-based basis, but their signup rates are something like under 1% of their dedicated listeners. It isn't easy.