Another approach I use is a bookmarklet to a site/tool called prereader. You can click the bookmark when on a site and it will render it in prereader without any of the additional content: https://github.com/egoist/preader#bookmarklet
I know how to enable it, but that's not the point. Google will always be able to take it away as long as it's only accessible to the handful of people who even think about this. It's come and gone before. This latest edition of the feature has been an "experiment" for years at this point. There's no good reason for that.
Defaults matter, and Google knows this. Every other browser has a button clearly visible in the default configuration and advertises it as a feature. There's no reason every Chrome-based browser has it except Chrome other than Google is afraid people will stop seeing ads.
Another approach I use is a bookmarklet to a site/tool called prereader. You can click the bookmark when on a site and it will render it in prereader without any of the additional content: https://github.com/egoist/preader#bookmarklet