I'll give an annoying popup/paywalled page one chance by trying reader mode, which often works. I'm extremely rarely motivated enough to bother trying any harder than that to read an article the publisher is actively working against me being able to read.

I didn't even consider reader mode to be honest. I've been using the disable-javascript thing for so long it's become the automatic go-to when I get such popups.

Plus if you're decent with the inspector, you can usually remove the paywall and then if the body doesn't scroll find the Event Listener for `onscroll` and kill that; it almost always is just a simple fn preventing scroll events

On this National Geographics page, in the inspector just select the <body> and in the CSS pane remove the "position: fixed" and "overflow: hidden". This allows scrolling.