No one wants to do the hassle just to open a page or article, that's why the options to monetize like Page Ads or Video Ads exist.
Of course people don't want to pay for anything and I can understand them. But also I can understand hi-quality content creators, who don't have enough subscribers to live from advertising revenue, therefore charging their readers a fee is the only possible way to earn a living for them.
We got a lot of traditional fast payment options and yet no one ever successfully deviced a similar scheme.
Traditional payment methods (Visa, MasterCard, PayPal etc) are unsuitable for this model due to high transaction fees. Therefore most sites with paywall use subscription model. With LN you can charge for every view separately as transactions are virtually free!
The service you are describing is called a content locker and it`s one of the most popular ways to make money online.The biggest content locker CPAlead was accepting 1$ PayPal payments thru their locker gateways,but they removed that feature.
I don't know about CPAlead, but $1 is a bit large amount for reading an article or viewing video. No wonder nobody wished to pay it!