I would gladly pay a few cents to read an article. Isn't the problem that no one figured out the business or technical model to accomplish that? I think I remember reading, 10 years ago, that bitcoin would solve that problem.
Well, the largest ad tech company on the planet owning the largest platform to view content on (Chrome) certainly may or may not have something to do with the viability of alternative payment models.
The mental transaction cost is the hard part. The effort required to decide whether to pay at all is significant enough that payments don't scale down to the micro- level.