I completely agree with your assessment of the problem. I'm using https://blendle.com https://blendle.com, which offers a wide variety of publications with pay

I completely agree with your assessment of the problem. I'm using https://blendle.com https://blendle.com, which offers a wide variety of publications with payment per article (usually something around 0.70 EUR, with the odd 1.99 EUR for articles from DER SPIEGEL). They also have a daily mix of manually curated content and content based on the articles I purchased in the past, which works really well. I'm afraid it's only available in the Netherlands and Germany so far. I didn't know the Brave browser had a payment model built in, will give this a try as well.