OK, setting aside the snark now, there is quite often excellent discussion here of paywalled articles, even when the vast majority cannot read the article. There are several factors that contribute to this.
1. The people who have read the article often include enough context in their comments for others to make meaningful contributions just from that they see in the comments.
2. There are a lot of smart people here who often take articles and comments as launching points to go off on very interesting tangents. That's often the most valuable part of the discussion.
Probably the majority of the HN discussions I've marked as "favorites" to save for future reference are because of comments that really have little to do with the article.
3. If it is actually an interesting article, other sites will either have their own coverage of the topic, or will write articles about the article and include plenty of quotes. A little Googling usually finds those, and they provide enough to let you jump into the comments if the topic is actually one where you need to be familiar with the article to handle. Some of these other sites start covering the story within an hour of the initial publication at the paywall site.
Googling "millenials and TV antennas" and asking for hits from the past 24 hours shows that sfgate.com, motherjones.com, and boingboing.net picked up the WSJ story.
I didn't say to subvert the paywall with google. I said that you can google for sites that have the article.