It's pretty cool that simply appending a period to the end of the domain name causes the paywall to disappear. I wonder if that's a bug, something not disabled when testing?

That looks like the truncated paywall version.

Not that I'm aware of. Outline can bypass some soft paywalls but that's it.

And unlike the niche owners of science publications, the press giants have massively more financial and legal firepower to get what they want - even political, given how they were able to bribe themselves the Leistungsschutzrecht in the EU and in Australia...