The status quo does suck, but banning all paywalls would be worse, because sometimes the most substantive article on a story is behind a paywall with a workaround. That seems to be the case here.
I don't know of a robust way to replace paywalled links with open ones to the same story. Sometimes people post Google search links to WSJ articles, but those don't work for everyone, and presumably there would be legal questions even if it did work technically.
It's also not as simple as the publications not wanting anybody other than subscribers to read their content, since they choose how high to make their paywall, and most have well-known workarounds. WSJ is one, though theirs is a step more annoying than NYT et al.
Previous comments on this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8777971