The Washington Post recently started asking for an email address in order to access free articles. You can make up any string which starts with a letter, put @gmail.com at the end, and give them that; they don’t check that you have access to the email account.
It really depends on how much you want to encourage engagement on a post. Ever since forever people have complained that folks in the comments clearly didn’t read the article, so when comments complain about a paywall you can A) do what OP did and describe the multiple steps each individual reader can take to access the article or B) link to archive when you make the post in the first place. Commenters complaining of a “paywall” are usually remarking on easy/immediate accessibility, not on whether it’s free or not.