[ktpsns]

I absolutely support such programs. Similarly to adblockers and DRM, they show that the mechanisms used to generate money simply does not work. Technically it is impossible to expose content to a (web crawler) robot but not to a human (inverse CAPTCHA). And technically it is impossible to control pixels on a free user device.

Publishers, if you want to have people pay for your content, make honest paid subscriptions and deal with it that you vanish from the openly accessible web.

[IshKebab]

Not necessarily. I could imagine Google adding a "paid crawling" service where you tell Google how much your content costs, explicitly allow them access via some authenticated method, and then they display the price next to your content in search results.

You're imagining that it can't work because it can't work in a generic way with all search engines, including future ones that don't exist yet. But that doesn't have to be the case. Most content providers only care about Google.