And yet I do pay subscriptions for the news and publications whose content I find good enough to be interested in what they will publish next, or if I support what they stand for. However, I feel no reason to pay subscriptions for one-off articles that may interest me from the myriad of media companies that I don't care to follow for one reason or another if they send me the content anyway. Their business model is not my problem.

You can just say you don't want to pay for it and would rather steal. No need to try to find some moral justification for it.

Do you have a legal reference that states bypassing paywalls is stealing?

Sure, there are a lot of moral gymnastics going on here.

Seems we don't really have a good understanding of what goes wrong with paywalled links.

For me, as an author, I find myself in a ridiculous situation when I want to share with friends works I've done for a site that uses paywalls but doesn't pay me (yes this happens in the real world of publishing). So I am ambivalent and often share a link along with instructions on how to bypass access controls.

But more generally I am irritated by links other people share, such as here on HN, that are paywalled. I'd rather not know about them than experience the frustration and time-waste of following them.

So there is a contradiction/tension at the heart of digital publishing, that creators, critics, researchers and commenters really want exposure/reach more than they want (or get) money.

That said, paywalls are not the only problem and are more understandable than sites that block Tor, use Cloudflare, Geo-block, or those brain-dead ISPs or university sysadmins who block sites based on broad keywords so that almost any kind of research is impossible without tunnelling out past their crappy firewalls.