[nojito]

>they don't scale

Hard disagree. There are many more websites with paywalls that still exist today vs the ones that relied on ads or donations to survive.

>they break the promise of an open web

The open web was never a thing because it has always cost $$ to even connect to the web.

[sowbug]

You're excluding the overwhelming majority of websites that were personal sites. Of those, the overwhelming majority are now gone. None ran with a goal of profit or even revenue. They cost so little that their owners were happy to keep them online at their own expense. But they were starved of attention by sites like Facebook and Instagram that used the open web only as one-way onramps to their walled gardens, so they languished and died. I contend, and you may disagree, that the information content of these small sites formed the backbone of the useful web at the time.

Sites that began with the question "how can we share what we know?" are what I call the open web. Sites that began with the question "how can we make money from* the web?" are what are killing it.

* I don't have a problem with sites that make money on the web. For all its problems, Amazon is a store that operates online. That's wonderful. But Facebook views the open web as a problem, locking a bunch of it behind uncrawlable access controls and pathologically self-serving algorithms. We used to share the public parts of our lives on our personal websites, usually for free as a part of the ISP subscription that we already paid for. Now all that happens on Facebook, and we've paid a multi-trillion-dollar tax for the privilege of doing what we used to do for free.