To me it sounds like the CLI subscription is a loss-leader designed to get you hooked so you'll upgrade once you realize it's valuable enough to pay extra for the "premium" features. It also sounds pretty reasonable to ban products designed to cheat them out of the difference in cost.
Am I missing some nuance, or is this just internet people being cheap?
If you use it to back up 100,000 MAUs, then they want you to use the API.
I was originally an API user but the cli subscription is so much cheaper that I switched over. This is a combination of th CLI getting much more useful and reasoning models using many more tokens.
If you dont like a service or cant afford it dont use it. If you do and you can, be a paying customer.
Edit: I appreciate the reply that we're probably on the same page.