Part of this is because the article’s author pushes a lot of sensationalist content to drive traffic to their Rust book(s). I remember similar articles several times over the last year, at least one of which was a thinly disguised ad for the Black Hat Rust book. That doesn’t mean the author is wrong, necessarily, but it does get annoying after a bit.
Adding extrinsic rewards for tasks like this can often introduce dark patterns eg maxing reviews to max rewards. It’s not as simple as “just pay someone to read papers.” As much as I detest academic publishers, it’s also not as simple as just throwing everything into open access (which we should do no matter what) and then having folks do it for the good of the community. There will have to be some experimentation with a balance of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.
In the US I directly pay for the funding for papers through tuition and taxes. I shouldn’t have to fucking pay a parasitic publisher on top of that just to access that shit. In math at least I don’t mind paying a little here and there for an MAA or AMS journal though.