A lot of sites don't seem to care about their paywall. Plenty of them load the full article, then "block" me from seeing the rest by adding a popup and `overflow: hidden` to `body`, which is super easy to bypass with devtools. Others give you "free articles" via a cookie or localStorage, which you can of course remove to get more free articles.
There are your readers who will see a paywall and then pay, and there are your readers who will try to bypass it or simply not read at all. And articles spread through social media attention, and a paywalled article gets much less attention, so it's non-negligibly beneficial to have people read the article for free who would otherwise not read it.
Which is to say: the methods archiv.is uses may not be that special. Clear cookies, block JavaScript, and make deals with or special-case the few sites which actually enforce their paywalls. Or identify yourself as archiv.is, and if others do that to bypass the paywall, good for them.
There are your readers who will see a paywall and then pay, and there are your readers who will try to bypass it or simply not read at all. And articles spread through social media attention, and a paywalled article gets much less attention, so it's non-negligibly beneficial to have people read the article for free who would otherwise not read it.
Which is to say: the methods archiv.is uses may not be that special. Clear cookies, block JavaScript, and make deals with or special-case the few sites which actually enforce their paywalls. Or identify yourself as archiv.is, and if others do that to bypass the paywall, good for them.