There's a fundamental "problem" that software-by-license is trying to solve. That's the fact that most software, in most domains, became good enough to do whatever you want with it, and pretty easily, years ago. Such tough times we live in. But the reason this is a problem is because companies have a zillion employees, sprawling high cost 'campuses', and baseline costs in the billions to tens of billions of dollars. So they need to sell to keep selling you new versions of products that don't really do anything new.
And so this is where we enter the domain of 'free to play' style operating systems, paying rent for a spreadsheet, and so on. All of these business models completely suck for most people. And they're also completely self defeating at scale. Because paying $20/month for Photoshop might sound nice compared to a $2000 up-front fee for something you might not even be using in a decade, until every single piece of software you're using tries to go the same route - and suddenly to do everything you were doing before, you'd need to pay $2000/month forever (of course with annual price increases), all the while everything you're using also spies on you, tries to deliver "value added ads", and all other sorts of crap. It sucks.
If companies were able to deliver products that people actively and enthusiastically wanted to buy, they would be. But they can't. So we get licenses, fees, rent for everything, spying, ads, and the further general enshittification of everything tech.