I don’t agree with this at all. I believe subscription models encourage laziness and/or introduction of unnecessary or complex features (to show that busywork is being done).

Sell a license for applications with support included for a year or whatever, like developers used to and still do. If you continue providing more value to customers, and if you aren’t too greedy to introduce new versions and upgrades for trivial updates often, why would the majority of your customers not purchase a paid upgrade every couple of years or so?

I feel there are many areas that are saturated and that developers struggle to figure out how to add more value...or rather, extract more money from customers (1Password in recent years is an example of this, in my experience).