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.
Most paywalls know this and don’t load the content at all. Don’t do it because it doesn’t work
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.