Funny, I was able to read the article text fine with Firefox. The key, I think, is to block SCRIPTS, not just ads. All the news sites (and many others) are wise to ad blockers and throw up walls against them. But the walls usually require client-side scripts. If ALL SCRIPTS are blocked (using something like NoScript) then the plain text version often gets displayed.

That's mostly on older/simpler sites, though. Many sites now require scripts to display anything; if they're polite, they'll give you an error message about needing to enable javascript, while if they're not you'll just get a blank screen. Mostly, it's news sites that do that. You can fight with which scripts in NoScript to enable in an effort to get something to display without triggering the paywall, but you'll usually lose - such sites display properly only in Chrome or something derived from it (like Edge), for the limited number (perhaps 1 or 2) of stories that they'll let you see without paying.