It is this and then in the cookie banner they write “we and our 800 partners care about your privacy” , I am like no, 800 is no longer private, but an orgy.
Yes, he did ask you to leave the site.
You can just leave, or make a fuss, or try to punch your way with the dev-tools. I honestly don’t care. But what he said does mean exactly “I don’t want you here, leave”.
It’s fynny when there is a full screen banner that tells you to pay to read the article and then you just use the uBlock origin zapper to delete that and read through the article.
-This message is brought to you by the uBlock origin gang
They got smarter than that. They show a page that looks like the one you want, but isn’t. It just serves as a vessel to show you that you need to pay. If you zap the modal, it reveals there’s nothing behind it.
Why would the website sweat, if you have an ad blocked they ain’t earning money from you anyway, right?
The real joke is the fact that Big G isn’t also offering you lots of ads, maybe even some LLM-generated gobbledygook for flavour.