You are absolutely right! Part of the horribleness is exactly companies like Google who were the ones teaching people that everything should be “free” as in usable without explicit money transaction, and now they are the ones who are (thanks to EU I guess) trying to revert that and make the business model viable through subscription.
So I do get why the problem exists and I feel no empathy for the companies that are to blame for that. But, I do worry that we have a whole generation of people who think that stuff should just exist and have no monetary value like it just materialized out of thin air without anyone working on it before and neither having to keep it running. That is not a healthy mental model and it will contribute to predatory companies being able to harvest data out of these people in the future meanwhile privacy-first companies can’t get them as customers because they have to actually ask for money for their services.
Well I mean stuff always has some costs assigned to it. Even if we are talking about Google or software in general, there are still people needed to create and maintain the software itself for the products, who in part also need to put some food on the table and get a roof above their heads. Then there are the infrastructure costs which are enormous on a global video streaming service like Youtube. Now, I do acknowledge that Google engineers are usually insanely well-paid, but that’s the way life is when you absolutely need the people working for you. Other companies might choose to cut features while searching for cheaper developers but it is what it is. In the end, nothing is free and you always end up paying for services in a way or another. And I’m not sure if I would like to continue on the “free” services path that we saw in the last 15 years.