[jasode]

>, that you can access research papers for free simply by reaching out to the authors and that many if not most of them are willing to provide said papers upon request.

Yes but in most cases, the authors are only legally allowed to give away the less desirable pre-prints manuscripts that was created for journal submission. The publishers allow them to retain the copyright to their draft work. However, the copyright to the final journal article with all the nice typesetting, pretty graphs, etc is assigned to the publisher. That more desirable finished article is the one behind the paywall.

(That's not to say that some authors "break the rules" and share the final journal article instead of their preprint but that's going to depend on the particular author.)

[IndPhysiker]

Many for-profit journals are now giving authors a few freebies of final versions to share with friends as the PDFs have DRM included. Old school researchers back before social media would use new articles they can't access as a reason to introduce themselves and build the professional network, which I sincerely hope is still going on.