I'm apparently for whatever reason in the category of "gets insta-paywalled, no quota, incognito mode doesn't help" but the comments elsethread making clear that many others aren't suggests to me that I was overestimating the actual annoyance level caused across the userbase, so the current policy now makes much more sense to me.
Incognito mode often doesn't help for me either, but if you look for workarounds posted in the threads, you'll usually find one. It's also ok to ask for one.
Thanks for the explanation.