Most of the time, yes. Some sites like to be sneaky though and disable scrolling and other weird annoyances. A simple DOM event to check for certain elements existing would circumvent removing of the element. I would remove all events associated with said element (if they exist) first to prevent weirdness. Hell even developing a greasemonkey/tampermonkey script for that particular website would be easy enough, so you don't have to do that every time.

Economist also lets you a few articles per week for free. If you find yourself bumping against their paywall with any regularity, perhaps you should actually pay for the content? Or, would you like to live on an internet where the only content that can pay for itself is clickbait?