Thank you!

Admittedly, paywall-busting doesn't work as well with Unclutter as with the text-extraction methods. But it's still effective for most sites and there are custom tweaks e.g. for nytimes.com.

I'm thinking about improving on this actually. It would be cool to fetch the page content from web archives automatically if it detects a paywall. Kind of like the "archive.is" links people post here all the time, but with less clutter.

I use the Bypass Paywalls extension [0] for this, and it works great with Unclutter.

[0] https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean

Is this the same extension as https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome?

I've been using the latter for years now too. It still doesn't work with hard paywalls like the ones on economist.com or wsj.com.

No it's a fork that strips out tracking info like Google Analytics and adds new features on top of it. Works for all the sites I've tried it on.

Is that paywall busting even an actual goal/requirement in reader mode, or just a fortuitous side effect of the way it does its "web clipping" (is that still a term?)

It's an intended side effect. The paywall banners are also just clutter to remove from the DOM, often the entire text is still there.

Technically, messing with paywalls is forbidden for Chrome extensions listed in the webstore (and detrimental for getting press coverage). Which is why no one advertises this.