@molly0xfff You're a software engineer. Have you considered ways you could help people move into some sort of self/cloud hosting?
Maybe authors could join pools that people buy into and can read a certain number of articles. Maybe you have teams of editors that compile articles for people to read (like the algorithms do today sort of) and they could buy into that and they could buy from the authors.
Cloud costs scale. Traffic can be distributed. Hosting is just technically heavy.