I personally use keepass, but could make a case for why one would prefer a subscription tool over Bitwarden:

I feel confident that I could look up a few articles and self-host Bitwarden on either my raspberry pi at home. If not at home, then I might pay for a DO droplet or something, and at $5/mo that's back to $60/yr already, might as well just pay and have the whole thing taken care of for me, besides downloading an app and logging in. That's assuming I have the technical familiarity. If I don't even have that, I'm probably not likely to care or even know if my tool is proprietary or open source.

Bitwarden also hosts and syncs all your stuff so on the free-tier so you get that as well. Self-hosting is optional if you want to, by default it's already a cloud tool. It already has feature parity with all the paid alternatives as far as I can tell.

A lot of "normies" aren't up to the task of deploying/managing bitwarden, so the "one stop shop" convenience of a paid solution appeals to them

Self-hosting is totally optional. I pay for the premium version mainly to support the devs, but the free version has free cloud sync already. I use LastPass a bit for work, and I can't think of any features LastPass has that Bitwarden doesn't.