It's easy to say "just don't buy it", but a few of us not buying it will not swing the balance sheets when the extra profit is so significant for the companies pulling this shit.
It seems inevitable that these types of subscriptions will slowly take over more and more areas of end consumer lives, until there's such a fatigue and hard push-back on subscriptions that it becomes profitable to create companies that sell products outright just to compete with subscription models.
As-is, launching a company that will compete with the subscription models is difficult. You will have a harder time finding investors (who will see the numbers and ask, "are you crazy?"). You basically have to do this, alongside others, just because you believe it's the right thing to do.
And then you have to not get bought up by a company that will introduce this model.
I'm not saying all subscription models are bad; I believe they're warranted or a good trade-off in a lot of cases, especially in hosted software. But knowing how significant a difference it makes, I just don't see this turning out well for consumers, even if we want to organize boycotts.
So, how do we speedrun to the part where "you own your product" competition exists and thrives?