It's indexed because, as you say, it's transmited completely. So maybe just disabling js it's readable. I have economist.com disabled in uBlock Origin (it works), but I guess that disabling all js would work too?

Because of that, I think not taking measures against this behaviour is the lesser evil.

(edit: small potatoes)

What’d scummy about being easy to defeat? Or do you mean google?

It's not about being easy to defeat.

It's scummy on the economist's side from a SEO perspective which I absolutely hate in all media outlets that do this.

If the full article is allowed to be indexed by a search engine, the expectation is to be able to get the _same_ result as the search engine is seeing when you click through.

This is clearly a cheap way to rank higher in search results. If you don't want non-paying users to read, then the same excerpt should be shown to the search engine.