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The article was interesting but what struck me the most was how the website only asked me to subscribe at the very end of the article. So sick am I of showing up to a website and almost immediately get hit with a subscription pop up. “Want more stories like this one?! Subscribe today”. I haven’t even had 2 seconds to read the story how can I know if I want more like this one. I will never give my info to a site like that. But this site asks at the end when I had a chance to assess if I like the writing style and content. Well done.
Since we're being meta, I will note that the website does in fact put up a popup telling me to "Please enable JavaScript!" that obscures the whole page. Amusingly the popup is translucent and I can see the content of the page behind it rendering just fine, so clearly JS is not needed for it.
That's where the "kill sticky headers" smart bookmark comes in handy: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/
Those bookmarks rely on JS.

I hope you can see the problem.

(I can DevTools the popup away myself, or switch to Reader mode, or just close the tab. No JS-executing bookmarks needed.)

Ah you are not using noscript but have JS actually disabled in the browser? Hardcore. I would tend to just use noscript but still use smart bookmarks, much easier to just mash a button than mess about with DevTools.
I opened it up in a separate tab (I use tabs like a reading list), and when I got to this article the popup was right there, that was my first experience of the site. So I'm guessing it's on a timer?
I got a "disable your adblocker" message, so I just read it on Reader mode.
I just got the Google we use cookies at the top and nothing else.
Is there any chance to find some DNA in it?
This is a tangent to the topic of the post but does anyone find it peculiar and moreover fascinating that such a relatively high traffic site is hosted and built on blogspot? I'm impressed to say the least. I feel like a site/publication of this scope would had outgrown that platform given their traffic numbers.
Blogspot was one of the first popular WYSIWYG Web 2.0 low-friction site editors, before Google bought them and took them even further.

Google and its employees used to have Blogspot blogs!