Bye bye, Giphy.

Wouldn’t it be better to at least put a modicum of effort in to have some privacy, than to put zero effort in and have none at all?

Yep. They’ve gotten smarter. Some of the plugins and tools websites use to create a paywall will actually only render part of the article to the browser before the user signs up. They used to simply mask it and you could remove the paywall via editing some CSS in the browser’s dev tools to see all of the text, but that’s not the case anymore.

Source: web dev for ~20 years.

This strikes me as state-funded or state adjacent hacking. Kind of like how the destruction of Twitter eliminated a source of on-the-ground, 24/7 information for the working class on all of the events our governments would prefer we not see so that their propaganda can be produced more lazily. Destroying the Internet Archive acts as another hindrance to the working class when it comes to staying informed and enriched.