Sure, front page headlines has always been subject to this.

But with the internet everything is the front page, and stories only get promoted based on how clickbaity they are. I can look past the top headline, this is several orders of magnitude worse.

Paywalls made this much worse, now every single link has to sell you a subscription. Which is bad enough if you don't pay for a subscription but absolutely devastating if you actually paid for content that only serves as bait for people that don't.