The worst offenders in recent history were bloomberg (where i had to open a support case to cancel) and some other news publication. FT was the best experience in news publications. More and more services seem to be getting better in this.
You click unsubscribe and are taken to new screen that presents you pricing plans and is worded in such way that you think you already unsubscribed. I actually thought so and almost thought that I'm done. But no, decided to check and saw that I'm still subscribed.
Turned out, there are THREE consecutive screens where you need to successfully pick the correct option to really unsubscribe.
Just a few examples: Xbox Live, you can sign up online but to cancel you have to call them and justify to them why you don't want to use their service anymore. Also had to do that to cancel a credit card recently. I've heard its even worse with companies like Adobe or like you mentioned, news publications.
As a customer, because of our bad consumer protection laws it makes me very hesitant to start a subscription with a new company and I vastly prefer doing it through Apple if I can.
With Apple, it's easy to see when you have a subscription active and to stop it from auto renewing. If cancel flows are getting easier it's probably due to pressure from this existing.
It's pleasant as a consumer that at least one company operates this way, but it's terrible that most people don't even consider that our government should be the one doing this, not private companies.