I paid ~$600 for my first Windows compiler, over a grand in today's money. But I didn't have to keep paying every month forever to be able to code at all. Take Claude or whatever away from a vibe coder and they're completely dead in the water.
Apple's fee is like that Visual Studio purchase I made, a fee that lets me compile for their platforms. It's not a subscription without which I can't code anything at all.
Creating a new dependency on monthly subscriptions to unsustainable companies or products is a huge step away from accessible programming of the last 50 years and one that should not so casually be dismissed.