In the broadest sense it's almost always better to attract customers by simply building a better product rather than some form of trickery, like making subscriptions unreasonably hard to cancel. Sure you might leave a little bit of money on the table in the short term, but as the author mentions it's hard to quantify the long term cost of being a bit of an asshole.

The prevalence of these sorts of tactics demonstrates the extent to which we've MBA-ified the tech economy away from what people used to like about it.