Sure, I too would prefer to pay with money instead of data. But that's a false dichotomy. Many of the services that require subscription also collect your data. Whereas offline local solutions do not collect your data. There are things were you pay with money and data, there are things where you pay with just money, or just data, and there are things where you don't pay at all. So it isn't really a 'both sides' issue.

Paying with your money and your data is more likely. The issue is not subscriptions imo either. It is getting sucked into megacorp schemes that will destroy competition with cheap prices and then enshittify and or raise prises once there is no alternative. Oh, and influence legislators to make competition illegal (youtube got big on copyright infringement).

Therefore I reduce megacorp stuff. I shop local, watch my dvds and started buying music again.

They can fuck off. So can everyone who has this neat reason why resistance to megacorps is futile.

Subscription based service makes data harvesting much easier. Spotify can force you to connect to their server even if you downloaded your song, in the name of "verifying your subscription".

Buy the songs, buy the movie, take them offline.

That being said there are good subscription based service, like home assistant cloud, where all your communications are always E2E encrypted and cannot be seen by their server. Their subscription model is justified, as they rent their servers.

I'm pretty sure you're paying with both as it is

I prefer not paying