I know this has been brought up before: is there any way to renew without using PayPal?
I have $14.95USD burning a hole in my pocket. 
As I understand it, PayPal has always processed the credit card transactions for renewals, even when the screen looked a lot different and it wasn’t obvious that it was PayPal working behind the scenes. So we’ve always used PayPal, and in that sense you have to use PayPal.
However, that doesn’t mean that you have to set up a PayPal account to pay for your membership here. There should be some option somewhere to just pay with a credit card and not set up a PayPal account. They have been making this less and less obvious in recent years and they keep changing the screens around so I can’t tell you exactly where that option is now. It should be there, somewhere, though.
This thread has instructions on how to do it from a couple of years ago. Hopefully they haven’t changed it too much from this:
Yes! That was the thread I remembered but failed to find.
Much thanks.