It's not ironic at all. The only reason the anti-paywall sites work is that the news companies in fact want some scrapers reading the full article.

Actually, the team behind archive dot today in at least spiegel.de has premium accounts, I presume bought with anonymous credit cards.

You can see artifacts when their servers are at queue load and you see the URLs, a few resources have the JWT with the account details in the URL. IIRC the clearname of the account in the token is Masha Rabinovich, with an email account masha@dns.li, an identity that has cropped up in various investigations [1][2].

[1] https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-...

[2] https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/145817/who-owns-...