if the smartest among us publishing for academia cannot figure this out, then who will?

Not infrequently, someone being smart in one field doesn't necessarily mean they can solve problems in another.

I know some brilliant people, but, well, putting it kindly, they're as useful as a chocolate teapot outside of their specific area of academic expertise.

Nope! There have in fact been education campaigns about the evils of URL shorteners for years: how they pose security risks (used for shortening malicious URLs), and how they stop working when their domain is temporarily or permanently down.

The authors just had their heads too far up their academic asses to have heard of this.

Free market is a euphemism for “there’s no physics demanding this be worked on”

If you want it archived do it. You seem to want someone else to take up your concerns.

An HN genius should be able to crawl this and fix it.

But you’re not geniuses. They’re too busy to be low affect whiners on social media.

Well, is the free market going anywhere?

Who's lost out at the end of the day? People who didn't understand the free market and lost access to these "free" services? Or people who knew what would happen and avoided them? My links are still working...

There are digitial public goods (like Wikipedia) that are intended to stick around forever with free access, but Google isn't one of them.