The things they’re railing against fall into two categories:
1. The OS vendor hasn’t built it into the OS.
2. Cost saving measures.
One the developer has little influence over. The other is business physics.
I expect the added costs apply similarly for other portions of the supply chain. Apple hardware provides similar quality to what you’re asking for. It is 2-4x more expensive and that’s with the advantage of scale.
But I do understand your point and I agree - it's not a cheap effort.
The subscription is more efficient in the sense that the folks getting more value pay more.
My hypothesis (and I have no data to back this up) is that most users leverage the same functionality over and over despite the updates and new features. As a hobbyist user of photo-editing software (and Photoshop in the past), I can't recall a single update to the stack in the past five years that was groundbreaking in my day-to-day usage of the tool. That's not to say this won't be the case in the future, but when it is, I will happily pay a premium for the next version.
There is, of course, the argument that subscriptions lower the bar of entry - a student can't afford $600 per tool, but they can much easier bear the $29.99/mo. My argument is less about "no subscriptions, ever" but more about "give me an option to give you money upfront and forget about updates until 5 years later."