One other thing about this is that they already said they had reduced the rate for meta stories.

So they claim they can identify what is meta (how, exactly? purely by topic tag? keywords?), and apply a reduction coefficient.

So why even bother about the paywall? They just set that coefficient to '0', et voilà! No earnings from the pot to meta stories.

Because otherwise, they are in a position where they are requiring every writer who has ever written a meta story to go through all those past posts and unpaywall them, or else be in breach of T&Cs.

Or they don't apply it retroactively, which means older meta stories still earn.

They are just flailing about.