It's a fundamental concern I've always had with subscriptions for non-entertainment services or trivially fungible goods. I've become a big believer in business incentives and feedback loops for sustainable commercial relationships. Individual leadership and culture can stand against them to some extent for a time, but individuals move on and it seems that near inevitably over enough years organizations tend to track and/or drift according to their incentives and impactful feedback. In a traditional software upgrade model, the default is that they get no money unless they can convince people to upgrade each time. They make their money from overcoming that default, and if people choose not to upgrade that's the most core unignorable feedback for a business that something isn't right. It doesn't guarantee responsiveness or good choices, but it forces them to think about it. From a customer perspective, not paying means the status quo, they don't gain anything new but they lose nothing either.

But with subscriptions it gets inverted. Now for the customer failure to keep paying means losing existing functionality and/or having to expend additional resources (money and time) actively moving to something else. So rather then needing to be convinced to give the company more money, it's more that they need to be convinced not to.

There's a real difference between "a customer base that is very happy" and "a customer base that is merely not irritated enough yet to overcome the inherent energy hump and go looking for a new local minima" and I worry the subscription business model makes that easier to ignore. Not that companies can't in principle find out in other ways! They can do detailed customer polling and so on. But that requires active effort and expense by the company so the temptation will always be to ignore it and follow inertia. This doesn't require the slightest bit of active malice, just a break in feedback loops resulting in drift as a company starts pursuing things from its own tunnel vision. They then look and see the money keep pouring in, so what's the problem? The threat eventually becomes that if the energy barrier is overcome and the stampede begins it's too late. It's a shame to see happen to companies I really really like and have great visions that could be even better.