I find the arguments pretty spurious and it's best not to engage.
It's their website. If you don't like their website, we got a whole other internet to enjoy.
Publishers would be better served if they restricted their articles, by demanding payment upfront before serving the article, rather than unreasonably and unrealistically demanding that people consume their content in a certain way. Don't blame your users for your failed business model.
As a side note, Copyright is not the place where this issue should be tackled as no copyright is being infringed (Content is not being redistributed).
Free sampling for the purposes of cultural remixing is explicitly built into (US) copyright (across media) as a mitigation to some of the harmful effects of artificial monopolies on culture. It's a compromise between those who think artificial monopolies are the only way to encourage the creation of culture and those who view such contrived monopolies as a net negative. There's a fundamental difference between copying and stealing. You seem to be intentionally conflating them by using phrases like "stuff other people made". It's not really "stuff" that they're "taking" and the copy is made by the copier, not the original composer. Nothing has been taken besides the right to artificially restrict the behavior of other people for the purpose of rent extraction.
Secondly, they give me a copy free when I request it. It just has ads included. But there's no reason I'm obligated to read the ads. It's exactly the case where they give me a free paper with an ad insert and I have the secretary throw away the ad insert before I read it.
Do you think I'm a monster because I throw out the ads in my weekly periodocal unread?
(For the record, I'm taking about ad blockers, not bypassing paywalls -- I generally just don't go to those sites. Your arguments hold more weight when discussing bypassing paywalls.)