Why on earth is a paywall an evil and worse than ads? This idea that everything on the Internet needs to be free-as-in-beer is the toxicity that has resulted in our entire world corrupted with ads. A News organization needs money to pay journalists and to send them to where news is happening. A video service like YouTube needs to pay for massive amounts of storage and servers. If you want quality professional content, and not just fake blogging thinly disguising advertising, you need to pay writers.
The alternative is that is it all corrupted with ads, or by the "rich uncle" of the day like a musk or a zuckerberg or whatever with an ulterior motive.
If you want the provider of a service or product to be beholden and at all responsive to you, as a user, rather than someone else, you need to be a customer, a paying customer. That's your only real leverage. If someone else is the real source of their revenue stream then their every act is geared to please them and not you. That's what we have now.
If you want to socialize it all instead, like a PBS, I'm fine with that, but good luck.
There's only one way your code gets better. And thinking your code sucks give you much more potential to improve than someone who thinks their code is perfect.