That's why it's a choice. If you weren't going to sign up to a site then it's just a pure degradation of experience to see links you can't use.

Yeah, I don’t get it. Do people want actual journalism to go out of business?

Kagi specifically rocks because it lets you downrank those sites.

I'd actually want to know if it is a paid website BEFORE clicking on it.

Nothing worse than clicking on it, and after 5 seconds you get the naggy pop-up that disables the scrolling. Now I need to send it to archive.ph to read it.

I'm fine with a paywall, but put it above, don't interrupt me as I am reading.

The small handful of news sites I willingly subscribe to are in my RSS reader (where stories are even more de-junked than is possible in a browser), so paywalled sites showing up in search adds no value.

If a news site wants to join the ranks of my RSS feeds they need to be of high enough quality that their reputation does more work than paywalled search results do.

If you don’t intend to pay anyway, what’s the issue? This option just gives you the choice to hide paywall results.

Easy to block / downrank known slop sites from Kagi: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html

Not all news sites are paywalled (reuters for e.g) and if I use a paid search engine like Kagi I'm not looking to experience unwanted advertisement (paywalls are an ad.)