They have an RSS feed... You can read the articles they publish on there without impediment.

It's a grey area - reader mode on Firefox bypasses that crap. "Pay or ok" is legal in the UK, but generally despised.

What rule is this breaking?

This hasn't been the first time I've seen this exact complaint against them in particular here on Lemmy, which seems sus. I honestly doubt the veracity of this.

I'm in the US (though I connect from various countries) and I haven't seen this particular prompt there ever. I use Firefox mobile and have it set up to send the GPC (Global Privacy Control, AKA "do not track") signal, which the site says it honors whenever I land there.

To be fair, I am also signed in with an account I set up using a randomly-generated [at] duck.com email alias, fake name etc. It's a free account, but even just doing that gets rid of the worst nags there. I also have given them money in the past (just random donations, don't want to do the whole subscription thing). I still see the prompts to subscribe, but it's like with Wikipedia - everyone knows it's annoying, but it's necessary for them to do that and have money coming in.

Honestly, the Guardian is one of the best major outlets that lets you read for free, which is a difficult line to walk. They filled a hole left by BBC, which has clearly mostly gone down the tubes. I've never been blocked from reading an article, as long as I'm logged in with the free account I made. I'm personally ok with that minor tradeoff to allow access to (IMO) the most prominent non-American western outfit still doing high-quality journalism.

Why not go after the actually shitty sites (especially the ones our crowd may not realize are actually shitty), and not the one just trying their best to generate needed income without compromising quality/integrity and, meanwhile, letting anyone read for free?

My research (which admittedly was just me asking AI) said that this is in fact legal as they just have to make it possible not to use cookies and making you pay for it is allowed. The bit about making it as easy to reject them as to accept them is just a guideline. I find most of these work with whatever reader mode you have in your browser so it’s not really a problem.