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Oh yes, per-seat licensing can be a huge problem.

I experienced a case in which a customer, for which most of the projects of our company were done, was requiring us to use a particular tool with paid licenses. They provided 2 or 3 floating licenses for the entire team of 30+ people, making that tool a huge bottleneck for us. They kept arguing that licenses are like 1k EUR each, but I don't think they ever realized they were wasting more money each month by slowing our work down.

It's $1 a month per user after 250 users. If that's not "casual read access tier" pricing, I'm not sure what is.

If you've got 250 users, you've probably got someone to manage these costs too. If you've got 12-40 users and much tighter operating budgets, read-only users get kind of costly.

A $1/month service is not a "massive" problem for anyone.