That being said; I dislike both full subscription (i.e. breaks on expiration) and lifetime licenses. Subscriptions are too expensive for software that rarely gets major investment and lifetime licenses are dishonest (e.g. company cannot work for free, so their funded is based on unlimited growth, which isn't realistic for most).
My current favorite business model is the "You're buying the current version and [years] of updates." Then typically you'll get some discount to renew your "[years] more of updates." This incentivizes them to deliver value, or you'll just stick with whatever version you purchased. Your software keeps working no matter what ("lifetime"). One example of someone who does this well is Jetbrains, but there are several companies.
Obviously subscription is the only option if they're delivering most of the value via a web-service of some kind (e.g. ChatGPT Plus).