I did try 13ft. But it misses several points.

The ladder applies custom rules to inject code. It basically modifies the origin website to remove the Paywall. It rewrites (most of) the links and assets in the origins HTML to avoid CORS Errors by routing thru the local proxy.

The ladder uses Golangs fiber/fasthttp, which is significantly faster than Python (biased opinion) .

Several small features like basic auth ...

> The ladder uses Golangs fiber/fasthttp, which is significantly faster than Python

I have a feeling that this performance difference is practically imperceptible to regular humans. It's like optimizing CPU performance when the bottleneck is the database.

Not for any publicly hosted instance, it’s not. We’re not talking about the time it takes to perform one request but the scalability it affords a small vm to handle so many requests in parallel when it is being used by the general public.

If the paywall is implemented in client code, then usually just disabling javascript for the site is enough to let you view it. If it is implemented server side, then there usually isn't a way around it without an account.