Of course most of the money comes from subscription fees, and of course both the publisher and university monitor the number of paper downloads. While the actual numbers are not public, it's reasonable to assume that the subscription fee divided by the number of paper downloads covered by it is within an order of magnitude of the price of an individual paper.

My point was that it's covered irrespective of the number of times a paper gets downloaded or read. The papers could get read 0 times but they're still making bank as long as they have those library contracts

And my point was that the average number of times a research paper gets read is low, regardless of whether it's behind a paywall or freely accessible. Given the costs of commercial publishing, the average cost of reading a paper must be high, no matter who pays for it and how.

It's far too high, the publishers shouldn't be able to capitalize on publicly funded research by gate keeping it