My experience with "dentists these days" matches yours. I go in for a checkup, and instead I'm getting sales pitches for mouth guards and alignment thinggys, and electric toothbrushes and all sorts of obviously high-margin dental accessories. And then there's the "well we usually recommend quarterly visits, but will accept twice a year" when I explicitly tell them my insurance only allows one visit a year. I basically say no to everything, and they try to guilt trip me into a bunch of optional procedures for a half an hour. Finally, eventually, they grudgingly clean my teeth.

It's like a shady auto mechanic for people who don't know anything about cars. You go in for an oil change, and they of course identify all sorts of optional repairs, making them sound super scary. "I'm not saying this small oil pan gasket leak will leave you by the side of the road, but you don't want to get behind on preventative maintenance!" Same tactic.

The icing on the cake is when, fast forward a few months, my insurance company sends me notice that they won't cover the visit because the dentist wrote the work up as "orthodontic prep" instead of "standard cleaning" so I need to contact them to get it corrected... and on and on...

I remember when you could go to the dentist, get a cleaning, be out of there in 45 minutes and be down about $100.