Your alternatives are mixing the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt yourself or buying them premixed as Krusteaz, which doesn't contain buttermilk or oil. Neither of these involves more or less dirty dishes than the other. At a guess, the premixed stuff costs US$4/kg, while if you make it yourself, it's US$1/kg. You can mix up 5kg pretty easily in a few minutes, say 10 minutes, saving US$15, which is an hourly wage of US$90/hour, tax free.

Possibly you have more remunerative things to do with your time, like writing code for your startup or grinding Leetcode for your Meta interview, which plausibly have higher expected value than US$90/hour. But many people don't. For them, buying Krusteaz is the same kind of self-destructive choice as smoking a cigarette or drinking a Coke.

Myself, I haven't made pancakes in a while, but at some point I switched from Krusteaz to just mixing the ingredients from scratch on the spot.