alt Hacker NewsWorth pointing out a success story: all ACM publications have gone open access starting this year[1]. Papers are now going to be CC licensed, with either the very open CC-BY[2] license or the pretty restrictive (but still better than nothing!) CC-BY-NC-ND[3] license.
Computer science as a discipline has always been relatively open and has had its own norms on publication that are different from most other fields (the top venues are almost always conferences rather than journals, and turn-around times on publications are relatively short), so it isn't a surprise that CS is one of the first areas to embrace open access.
Still, having a single example of how this approach works and how grass-roots efforts by CS researchers led to change in the community is useful to demonstrate that this idea is viable, and to motivate other research communities to follow suit.
[1]: https://authors.acm.org/open-access/acm-open-for-authors-hom...
[2]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
[3]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en
That works nicely if your institution participates in ACM Open (no such institution in my country, and no, my country is not in the list of lower-middle income countries).
The combination of 'publish or perish' with 'pay for publication' and 'miserly grant money' is deadly.
While in theory the idea is nice, in practice this is a problem (maybe not in most rich countries, but here definitely).
Nowadays, you could always get the article you are interested in, even if it is beyond a paywall. Hence, perversely, the old model (which I hate, for reasons well explained in the original post) worked better for me. :-(