There’s a RAT in Arch Linux (because someone made one downloadable in the Arch User Repository) is about the same level of non-sense as telling the story of how Windows ships with hundreds of viruses because those can indeed be freely downloaded as .exe-files from the Internet which you can access via Windows. 🤣
Now that I think about it… It’s even worse. You cannot actually get an AUR package without explicitly installing the tools to get them (and most likely reading the disclaimers and warnings for using the AUR on the way), while you can can in fact download and execute malicious content with the pre-installed Windows tools.
Then there is your answer:
You see the whole article, others don’t. Publishers sometimes decide by your IP, your location etc. if you are allowed to read it freely (also putting rate limits up, so if enough people in your vicinity already saw it you will hit the paywall reasoning that you are already interested and more willing to pay). Or they simply put up the paywall later based on how popular an article is.
Or in short: a lot of new links have paywalls because the people posting something didn’t even know there was one.
PS: many people regularly clicking news from all over the world also often have addons, plugins and filters running that circumvent a lot of those paywalls automatically, so we sometimes tend to forget about them…