I did train through times when access to articles wasn’t easy (because there was no scihub and I worked in india) and honestly getting the articles was not even my 10th biggest concern. I always had 50-100 pdfs ready to read, adding more to that queue was not an issue. Only times when access to literature was a problem was when you had a particular article you needed details from (which weren’t in the abstract). This was rarely a blocker and if it was there were options.

Again, I’m not saying I wouldn’t prefer to have free unfettered access to all research ever performed, or that we should give these publishers a pass, but I want to emphasize that this is not a big issue for academics. Funding, focus, politics, the culture of publish or perish, the Ponzi scheme like training funnel, these are the bigger issues.