I have no problem with Plex doing this. They're trying to show value for a service rather than just gatekeeping premium convenience features.
My problem with Plex is the utter distain they show for users by not having any sort proper bug triage. Users throw themselves at a forum that staff members rarely interact with. It's desperate.
A bug that also affected me was reported at least twice (March 2019 and April 2019[1]).
After 5 months of wait, the OP posted a script he wrote to work around the issue.
A simple path building issue took 8-9 months to get pushed in the BETA channel.
[1] : https://forums.plex.tv/t/dvr-moving-files-from-grab-bug/3967...
For example: the long-term threads asking for a “TV” mode that will automatically play your library in channel format so that you can go channel surfing.
Even the very very basic version of this (the ability to automatically update playlists) is essentially a dead thread.
e.g. the auto updating playlist idea would be done reality easily with the python Plex api above.
The UI is great, transcoding and playback on a myriad of devices just works, sharing with other people is a few clicks. To me Plex is the perfect example of the Jim Gaffigan joke; everything is amazing and everyone is miserable.
But there are so many widespread issues that appear ignored. Things like AMD VCN support, Android clients forcing transcoding on some streams. The problem get acknowledged but there's no easy way to track progress. You don't have to dig far to find others users in there who feel habitually ignore, usually as replies ~"I reported the same thing 7 months ago, good luck getting an answer!", eg https://forums.plex.tv/t/is-anybody-working-at-plex-going-to...
It's a shame because it's not a bad product.