I do agree with the spirit of your point, but there's an easy counterargument:

How do you know that the next month worth of articles from the publisher you are subscribed to is worth the fee before seeing it?

There is a such a thing as building trust in a brand, this is not a barrier to micropayments.

I wonder how many of the people who say they'd pay 50c would actually pay 50c if they could.

I'd say I read an average of 10 articles per day (with various definitions of "read"). I can't see myself actually spending $5 a day.

At that point I'd be better off getting a few news site subscriptions, but I also highly dislike the idea of committing to a single news source, and committing to a few isn't much of an improvement.

Of course, you could introduce a "tip after you read" mechanism, which I assume would generate probably about 50c per article, and probably motivate various "remember to tip" mechanisms that (I suspect) the same people who say they'd pay/tip would hate with a passion.

You don’t but you have to put a base price on content for it to work. The point of a $0.50 access fee is that all articles individually would cost $0.50. Then you charge a subscription to unlimited access.

No one’s successfully done this because when they do they want to individually price articles and consumers like you for some reason want to attach a per-word-price for each article.

Implement a legitimate system and people will use it. Implement a system with work arounds and people will use the work arounds.

The reality is that most people just want stuff free.

They say stuff like they whitelist, or donate (it certainly brings lots os social praise) but if you have ever been on the other side, you know that virtually nobody does this.

I had hoped that Brave's BAT would get some kind of traction for similar use cases but it seems to be quickly going nowhere.