I would be "happier" to pay a subscription to an aggregation platforms like hackernews or reddit to access archived articles that are linked to these sites. In turn a proportion of that could be passed on to the underlying publishers that I actually visit. I have nearly zero interest in reading articles that aren't linked to from an aggregation site.

I don't want to read theguardian.com, or nytimes.com, or washingtonpost.com, or bloomberg.com, I want to read news.ycombinator.com. Paying an individual subscription to every possible underlying site that could be linked to from news.ycombinator.com is a non-starter.