Companies should also be fined heavily for charging 4 coins for an item, but only selling the coins in increments of 17. It's an obvious scam.
IMHO PayPal dollars are the worst because they trick you into believing you hold currency when you don’t. PayPal may, at their discretion, allow you to convert your PayPal dollar to another currency. They also may take it away from you for no reason, without recourse - something that happens to thousands of people daily.
They serve a couple useful purposes though, even from a consumer's perspective (unless we fix enough other broken things about our payment infrastructure). There's an inherent conflict between convenience, security, transaction fees, and the chance of not being paid (or for online services like this, the guarantee that somebody orchestrates millions of accounts to distribute a compute load while fully expecting to never pay a dime) when dealing with very frequent or very small transactions.
Other options Adobe might have considered include:
1. Don't offer the feature (if the feature is good enough to tolerate company currency then this seems like a worse option)
2. Pay per use (high transaction costs, high friction if you don't store payment details, low security if you do, risk of default if you batch uses over time, ...)
3. Monthly subscription giving unlimited uses (not tenable for AI that has very real compute costs associated with it, you'll have users abuse the limits)
4. Monthly subscription with a max number of uses (just a different way to pay for credits, strictly worse than buying credits and having them last indefinitely)
5. Batch uses over time, bill if they exceed a threshold (lowers transaction fees, increases security, increases consumer goodwill, vulnerable to targeted attacks)
And so on. Do they actually have any good options, or are they choosing between a bunch of least-bad solutions? I ask partly because I was planning to use a similar model of charging up-front for credits for an unrelated service because I thought it would be the most consumer-friendly in that domain.
That all being said, I would celebrate the demise of loyalty points, gift cards, Robux, Chuck E. Cheese tokens, and so on. All of it is fundamentally anti-consumer. I'm not sure when countries outlawed paying your employees in scrip why they didn't go one step further since scrip is intrinsically anti-competitive.
I think you can steelman some good arguments for scrip though... both in terms of "why venerate fiat state-backed currency as having a special status" and "some people actually LIKE the inflexibility or having to spend their money on a certain companies products, such as compulsive misers"
It has prices such as 0.000001$ per request (which is evil) and virtual currencies like Load Balancer Capacity Units (LCU).
Circle CI has points too.
Basically, everything so you would not figure out the total price easily.