Yes $42 feels quite cheap to me. I pretty much always have a ChatGPT tab open, mostly for coding but also sometimes for searching more broadly or exploring it's capabilities.
It's worth it to me just to have access to a version that doesn't go down as much. I would say I can work about 30% faster on most computer related tasks having it.
It feels like another Google (to me). I'd pay $42/mo for Google if it didn't exist otherwise.
The nice thing too, if Stable Diffusion is any indication we'll have an even better open source version in a year or two.
In either case I just want access to the stuff the automates the largest amount of boring repetitive work.