The core of my code is a line by line translation of the Firefox version. I know what it does, but not the exact motivation for everything, so it has many hidden tricks I never noticed. I'm not in Europe and I never tested this, but it's possible that it does remove some of the modals, as long as the actual content is on the page.
It won't do anything for the TechCrunch case you describe, because it only fetches the one webpage you point it to (and any redirections).
I took a very quick look at the source code, and seems you’re using the curl default options for things like the user agent. Please correct me if wrong!
Did you try pretending to be a search engine crawler, for an idea..?
It won't do anything for the TechCrunch case you describe, because it only fetches the one webpage you point it to (and any redirections).