I think it would be marginally quicker for me to access a paper legally if I was on my uni's campus. But I am WFH from the other side of the country and would need to log into the VPN. Sci-hub with one of these solutions would be much quicker!
My company gives me access to a few journals, but at home I have no such thing. $20 is ridiculous for a paper, given that (a) the authors rarely see anything of this money, and (b) you often need to skim 10 papers before you find the 1 that's relevant.
Luckily, many papers in my research domain (compsci/ML) are open access. 90% is either on arxiv or Google Scholar knows a pdf URL.
For the rest, scihub is a lifesaver.
The authors never see anything of that money. Scientific journals do not pay for the authors of the published research papers.
You want your article to be open access? No problem, that'll be thousands more dollars.
IMHO it's not rarely but never, I'm not aware of any plausible scenario where any author would ever get a single cent of that payment.