At least most of the German and French media industries do, and they've been getting away with doing the exact same pay-or-consent thing for years. So it's easy to see why Meta would think it'll work for them as well.
(I think Meta will lose this, but it'll be a good test for whether the laws really are the same for everyone.)
> What if a privacy subscription costs $1000/mo?
That's a weak argument, because it implies that there is a price at which this is OK. I.e. there's no actual principle at stake and we're just haggling about the price.
And if it comes to some price being ok, Meta isn't trying to charge $1k/month like in your thought experiment, but an amount pretty close to what a typical Facebook user in Europe produces in ad revenue. Trying to argue that pricing that just matches e.g. the 80th percentile user is unreasonable seems like a loser.