The current system is vastly more invasive of reader privacy than the alternative suggested.

The publishing site, numerous third-party metrics providers, advertising providers, ISPs, and any MITM listener has access to the full metadata, at a minimum, and potentially full data.

You'd need to disintermediate via Tor (blocked or disabled by a great many sites -- Cloudflare and Google are particularly culpable here), or other means, to avoid this.

I've made a habit of using Tor extensively for a number of reasons, tab management among them (opening trivial articles in a Tor browser and having them wash out helps, very slightly, in managing my tab explosion in Firefox/Android).