> Many sites already work around this, and reader mode only shows a blank page or the contents of the disavow human rights box.

Refresh while in reader mode. The DOM with most paywalls is destroyed post-render, not before it reaches the web browser. Refreshing in reader mode prevents client side scripts from executing and rewriting the DOM. I'm presuming this is to be search engine friendly, but I'll leave it to the SEO experts to educate me.

This is what I do with most sites.

Disabling JS also often works for the same reason. (But reader mode is great, nothing against it.)

With iOS, for example, refreshing npr.org just turns off reader mode.

As you refresh it should change the address bar saying reader mode avaiable and you should be able to quickly hit the Aa icon on the top left.

They redirect to another subdomain, so I don’t think this will work. Thanks anyway!

> The DOM with most paywalls is destroyed post-render

This has changed for most major sites. Users behind the paywall are served a "truncated" version of the article that never included a full version of it. The days of "press Esc before it finishes loading!" are coming to an end it seems.

The truncated version is still more SEO-friendly than a blank page as it has the headline and partial content.