I think this is a BAD thing for the health of the comment section. An even worse outcome is people commenting based on the headline and maybe a blurb only. How is that supposed to promote a good community?
If you want paywalled articles being the bulk of the posts on hacker news that garner discussions then we might as well just go ahead and paywall this site.. because it's slowly becoming a paywalled tech discussion site.. just with more steps.
For browser extension, see: https://github.com/iamadamdev
it is mildly annoying to see the same complaint over and over when the solution involves only a minimal amount of research.
Piracy is piracy
It probably tells that you also hit the paywall. Those who downvoted probably didn't, perhaps because their setup doesn't trigger it by default, or because they searched by themselves how to avoid it.
I personally didn't see any paywall when accessing the site directly (ie, without a VPN).
I won't bother digging into all of the details of bad publishing business models in academia, but that is a direct counterpoint to the blanket statement you're trying to make.
With staying on topic re: The costs to the end consumers. It's not personal greed to not want to pay to access the content when the cost of the content doesn't reflect the cost to produce it or even a "fair premium" on top of what it costs to produce it.
You're also discounting the business models themselves and how they work. Let's say I care to read this one specific article from NYT. Why do I have to pay to access all of their content? If they want more money they'd allow me to do a microtransaction to purchase this article. And no, not 20-30% of what a month long subscription costs.
It is in fact a bad business model. In either case, I don't pirate these articles and I'm even arguing against using workarounds to view them without paying. So don't try to paint me as some comically evil person who just "doesn't want to pay" because my argument is inconvenient to your world view.