I'd made this point a bit over a year ago with regards to Hacker News, based on my own work scraping a full history of Front Page views from the "past" archive.
Note that there are only 30 stories which make the front page per day, total submissions run somewhat higher, typically a bit over 100, and about 400,000 per year per research by Whaly.[1]
As of 21 June 2023, there were 52,642 distinct sites submitted to the front page.
Counting those with 100 or more appearances, that falls to 149.
Doing a manual classification of news sites, there are 146.
Even at a modest annual subscription rate of $50/year ($1/week per source), that's a $7,300 subscriptions budget just to be able to discuss what's appearing on Hacker News from mainstream news sources.
Oh, and if you want per-article access at, say, $0.50 per article, that's $5,475 to read a year's worth of HN front-page submissions (10,950 articles/year), and that is just based on what is captured on the archive. In practice far more articles will appear, if only briefly, on the front page each day.
Which is among the reasons I find the "just subscribe" argument untenable. Some sort of bundling payment arrangement is required.
Do I need to subscrible to all of them?
Just not practical...