It's already called out in the article, "(Yes, you may face this very dilemma reading this story in The Atlantic.)"

The author doesn't have control over the paywall policy, and he probably isn't a full-time journalist. So I don't think this is as much of a "gotcha" as other comments make it out to be.

But, interestingly enough, another author wrote a very similar, non-paywalled article at https://www.poynter.org/commentary/2022/all-news-election-ar... a few years ago! I wonder if Stengel was aware of it.