Roughly $50

I'd argue that's better than most... I think a paywall with a soft funnel can do wonders to bring people to pay for content that they value.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that what I really object to is the clickbait headlines, since they cause me to use up my five free WaPo articles very quickly each month, only to be disappointed that the articles do not actually live up to the bait offered by the headline.

But I agree that the concept of a paywall is not necessarily evil. FWIW the sites I do pay for all have paywalled content.

Anyway, for the WaPo you can click on your browser's Reader Mode button and that bypasses the paywall. However I stopped to read the pop-up and they have a $20/year international subscription, so I decided to pay for that.