They decided to sell access to the content in exchange for user information, thereby forcing human readers to choose between surrendering privacy or using other means to access the content, all in order to make up purportedly for a perceived slight by bots. Maybe their motives are pure as the driven snow–and it’s their content, so they can wall it off however they please–but I’m confident you don’t genuinely mean to suggest that this measure will stop the content from being scraped and fed to LLMs.