This. Is. Exactly. What. I. Wish. For. A. Very. Long. Time.
Nowadays every news site has paywalls. I'm willing to pay for good work, but if I pay a single news provider, I'm missing too much. Nobody is willing to pay for every publisher. Even if an article is just a few cents I neither want to be annoyed with the payment process nor do I want to manually keep track of how much I spent for news in a month.
We really need a platform providing a news flat rate, aggregating most larger publishers.
I'm using sway for approx. 2 years now and am very happy with it as drop in replacement for i3. What bugs are you referring to?
For bars, there are swaybar and waybar that run very smoothly. It's not 100 % polybar but with waybar you can get kind of close.