If that were true, they had 2 decades to fail and they didn't. People like to read the news.
The problem is that the ad-supported Internet model hollowed out American journalism, turning it into a howling wasteland of listicles and tracking pixels, and the industry is simply hanging on for dear life at this point. If the OP had some recommendations for a better user experience that wouldn’t essentially kill what remains of the non-top-shelf (NYT, WSJ) or hyper-focused (TPM, Axios) journalism market, I’m all ears, but there’s nothing there that’s helpful.
The free-news model almost requires aggressive tracking, which I agree is unsustainable.
The revenue graph here gives a good overview of how the industry has declined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#Crisis
The majority of sites are like those cheesy carnival games trying to get people to "step right up" and are just as rigged as the games to try and keep you around, blasting your face with ads.