There are plenty of posts every day that don’t require you to get through a paywall - I personally just ignore them. I imagine there are only a handful of paywalled articles a week, and most of them end up having an archive link in the comments anyway
It is funny how things that were completely ordinary 100 years ago are now considered luxury items. I suppose it's because they're used for leisure instead of as work horses/transportation, and because feeding/housing/mucking is now a burden for city/suburban dwellers.
The more time goes by, the more wondrous the recollection of my grandfather (1909-2006) telling me about growing up living across the street from a livery stable (i.e. horse commuter parking). Men would come into town to work at the steel mill and leave their horse for the day. He would say that after about 1922, cars were much more common, which in retrospect given the relative cost makes me think more that they crowded out horses, rather than the common mill worker upgraded from a horse to a car.
(If I remember right, some video links dont always work with xcancel.)