I'm confused. Why wouldn't an Adobe subscription materially improve the ability of a graphic designer to do their work? I've also never felt the need for new hardware every year as a software developer.
With the subscriptions, you're paying $600+ a year, every year, in perpetuity, and you're subjected to invasive DRM that'll do shit like delete fonts you haven't used recently.
Before subscriptions, upgrades were often cheaper than buying new, and you might only buy an upgrade every four or five years (the core requirements of a graphics app don't change majorly, so new versions are more about stability, optimizations, and the occasional niche feature).
... thankfully, there's enough competition in this space that I've managed to completely remove Adobe from my toolset, but it still sucks that I can't even activate my 2013 version of Adobe's Creative Suite (CS6) because the licensing servers no longer function.