Unfortunately Apple doesn’t allow paid updates short of releasing a whole separate app, and you can’t do upgrade discounts for current owners except via weird bundle discounts by sticking the new and old versions together as a package. So Apple is to blame for all the subscriptions.

We're talking about a macOS program, where companies don't have to bother with Apple's rules to sell their software, so your comment is off-topic.

Panic is good example of this kind of pricing.

Nova is $99 (last I checked), and gets updates for a year. After that, it's $75 for another year of updates.

If you don't want to update, you don't have to. You can even update every second or third year or whatever you want and catch up with all the missing features and updates.

Let's not just throw up our hands and say, "Oh, well. Apple makes me do this, so there's nothing I can do." Innovate.