This is a product for advertisers, not users. The users are just corralled into the consuming the feed.

And paying for a service does not mean that the relationship is not abusive. Meta would be happy to collect both money and data from all parties.

While you're correct in the purest sense of what you say, this is an unfair realization of the exchange. It's very zoomed in to the micro level. The macro level is much more interesting.

It's not wanting free stuff. "Meta", and many many web services, literally scream "hey here's a free way to connect with your friends" or whatever their pitch is. And then operate in ways that violate the rights of the people they attract to use their service in the name of "more money" (note, more money because the reality of it is that Meta could easily offer privacy and still operate, just at lower profits). Offering a paid version, in the way that this does, is putting a bandaid on a bullet wound. It's holding you hostage and saying "you can use this the way we intend and we'll violate your privacy or you can pay for that to not happen".

When in reality the proper way to have such an exchange would be to say "Dear Users, the service we provide you costs $200 a year, however if you would like that to be free you can opt in to these incredibly hostile and violating contracts if you would like". But, we all know that no one would join that service because it's too honest about its exploitative nature and so the user-hostile nature of these companies goes on ad nauseam.

The price charged is prohibitively far above what is reasonable for avoiding ads, and Meta is quite aware of the advertising value of each subscriber that I can only assume they set the price so high as an intentional deterrent. They want as few people as possible to purchase this alternative, rather than simply to try to keep their revenue satisfactory either way.

In other words, they want to pretend that they are allowing users to freely choose between paying or seeing their information used in ads, but even if the GDPR does allow pay-or-OK consent schemes - this is itself an unsettled legal question - it’s far from clear that declining an unaffordably priced alternative counts as the kind of free consent the GDPR requires for consent-based processing. Lots of cases are still working their way through European DPAs and courts.

And, frustratingly, I don’t think they promise no tracking even with the subscription. They just promise not to use the information for ads. They still allow themselves to process your data for many other purposes which under EU law should have a way to say no.