I'm sure they are, but I don't see how it relates to my question. Like, you wouldn't see anyone posting links to download a movie, or an app, that would otherwise require people to pay. So why is the practice so common to links here? I mean, shouldn't HN users pay for the journalism they're so eager to discuss?
Enablement of archive links is a decentralized decision made by content owners.
Shouldn't HN respect the distribution decisions of content owners? The primary link on an HN story is always the paywalled link, which offers search engine benefits to the target.
There's a long history of multi-channel distribution policy and variations in priced and non-priced benefits to content owners, from the first days of print to the ever-evolving online economy of paywalls, traffic brokers, ad brokers, content scraping and surveillance capitalism.