Was the code you wrote funded by the public?

would that matter? If it was funded by the public the institution which would own it would likely be a public one, which may come with different and more permissive licensing conditions, but the justification for OPs complaint "I can't even view my own paper", their emphasis on 'my own' wouldn't be true either.

Academics tend to do have a fairly odd and what seems like a romantic attitude to their work. They're employees, their programs and equipment are paid for by someone else whether that's the state or a business, they don't own it unless the terms they signed up to say so.

TBH none of that matters to me. If it's publicly funded, it should be 100% public domain

It's not his employer that has the rights-- it's the publisher which at no point paid for the research.

As an American tax payer I funded the poster's research. And yet if I want to read about it I have to pay a foreign private company that played no role in orchestrating or funding the research itself.