I don't get the connection between a subscription and getting a user hooked, making the service worse, or ensure worsening of the service. All of these things

I don't get the connection between a subscription and getting a user hooked, making the service worse, or ensure worsening of the service. All of these things can be true, all without a subscription. Not having revenue certainly makes it impossible to sustain a business to work on a service, without some other kind of monetization path, like ads, or data harvesting and sale.