That was one of my favorite features of Google as it let you see pages while the host server was down or if the content had been removed.

Yet another actually-useful-for-users feature that got removed because profits.

I thought that was because many news sites pressured Google not to support it. The cache feature still works for certain sites like personal blogs.

I don't get this mentality. First you go through hoops to serve the Google crawler with a full version of the article. Then you get pissed when Google presents it to the user.

I think the publishers should go ahead and create their own paywall content search engine but I would like the option to have my search results actually be available when I click them.

It's not removed, just less visible. Webmasters also have the option of hinting that they don't want a page cached, which some use.

They used to.