No, that's a hoax. The popular depiction and tale of Santas came way before Coca Cola even existed: https://fakehistoryhunter.net/2021/12/03/coca-cola-did-not-create-santa/

https://www.stnicholascenter.org/who-is-st-nicholas/origin-of-santa

Welcome to capitalism, where profits of a few are more important that scientific improvement.

Publishers don't give a s%it if the articles aren't available to everyone, they want to make profit from subscriptions. Authors are kinda forced to publish their papers on the mainstream vehicles, so they don't have a choice.

It has nothing to do with research costs like some people here are saying. Neither the authors and universities get a penny of the subscription money.
However, if you email any author asking for .pdf of a paper/article that he wrote, he'll gladly send you for free, also there are people fighting this, like Alexandra Elbakyan, with scihub (If you don't know her, look it up, here's the transcript of her presentation "Why Science is Better with Communism? The Case of Sci-Hub." https://openaccess.unt.edu/symposium/2016/info/transcript-and-translation-sci-hub-presentation).

1- The Chinese firewall doesn't control the internet, it only blocks access to some sites from within ISPs located there. Anyone can set a VPN, and it isn't illegal, even the government provides VPN.

2- Some areas aren't under this protection, like Hong Kong.

3- For things like the lockdown "protests" (that are basically color revolutions funded by imperialist countries), the ones recording are journalists from other countries. They either can ship the physical media, or they can use VPN to send the recordings