It sucks, but there is a very legitimate reason for it.

Science requires peer review to be accurate. Peer Review requires consulting top experts from a given field. Getting top experts from a given field is very expensive since it lays a relatively high opportunity cost for their time. Peer review is still not always accurate, there is a crap ton of politics in getting a journal published, who you know on the peer review board, your research history, your own credibility, your brand recognition if you've had a long enough career. The journal fees pay for those peer review systems. Nowadays journals are essentially funded by universities across the world when they get access passes.

So as unethical as it may seem to block research from being viewed, the other option is no peer review which means evidence goes from questionable to dog shit.

Basically, the big fees pay for the good articles, it is how we sift through the genuinely good articles from the bad ones. I would honestly say about 50% of rejected papers are due to minor or major statistical errors, many of which could be checked by software with good NLP. So in the future I do think we can scale down the costs of journals in real terms, or to be apter, it is possible to scale down costs, in real terms, I just don't know to what extent it will actually be done.