Isn’t the alternative I see oft bemoaned here that if you don’t pay, you are the product? I’ve been content to pay them for a couple years, hoping it keeps them

Isn’t the alternative I see oft bemoaned here that if you don’t pay, you are the product? I’ve been content to pay them for a couple years, hoping it keeps them updating and ad-free. Thus, I don’t think there was a change in terms of the deal for me in this case. While $36/year felt high relative to, say, my cloud storage costs, but it seems hard to me to then follow the claim that ditching them for a competitor is now impossible. Just seems that it wasn’t worth his time for that amount of money?