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JenniferRM comments on Individual vs. Group Epistemic Rationality - Less Wrong
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The issue is not "who gets to read a specific peer reviewed paper" but much more "who benefits from the world state that comes about after the paper existed to be read by anyone".
The obvious benefits are mostly the practical fallout of the research - the technologies, companies, products, medical treatments, social practices, jobs, weapons, strategies, and art forms that occur only by virtue of the research having been done that provided the relevant insights to people who could leverage those insights into various sorts of world improvement. Knowledge dissemination happens via many mechanisms and scientific journals are only an early step in the process.
If the only benefits of science were to individual people who read the papers, then no government on earth should or would subsidize the process. If positive benefits stop being derived from knowledge work, and this fact reaches the public consciousness, democratic subsidy of science will eventually cease.
How do you reach that conclusion? Governments subsidize all sorts of activities which benefit particular sub-groups more than the general population. It is hard to identify any government activity which doesn't implicitly favour certain groups over other groups.
In reality the benefits of government funded science tend to accrue to more than just the individual people who read the papers but funding decisions are clearly not based on any kind of utilitarian calculus.
There is a difference between science, a.k.a. basic research, and technology, a.k.a. applied science. A popular justification for funding basic research is that it suffers the positive external effects you mention, but this is inappropriately conflating science and technology. Technology doesn't suffer from external effects. The patent system and the profit motive allow for technological goods and services to be excludable.