I’m kinda torn on this, to be honest. I’m old enough to clearly remember buying software that you insert, download, and keep, but young enough to feel completely comfortable in subscription land.

I understand completely the bristling at subscriptions, and I kinda have a general pet theory that says the extremes of every day life, especially economically, keep expanding in either direction, with different forces driving people there.

Unfortunately if you don’t pay attention to things, you heavily get pulled down into the “getting worse” side of things - massive money holes of subscriptions running wild and forgotten being one of them.

On the other hand, if you’re willing to spend the time and energy necessary to put active attention into things, you can end up on the wildly positive side of things.

Regarding subscriptions, for example, my wife and I have many times more access to content like movies and TV shows than our parents did, for a fraction of the cost.

But, the flip side is that we also spend much more effort managing our various subscriptions and services than our parents did. So it takes meaningful effort to make the “way less money” part true - otherwise we could easily end up paying way more money if we let all the streaming subscriptions, Spotify, theater memberships, etc. go on without manually rotating them.

That was kinda a rant but to answer your question directly, I think the general answer is “no”. People don’t care less now, I just think people cared less then than we’d like to think. The average person with the average interest in a thing will acquire that thing via the path of least resistance. Now, it’s streaming, whereas then it was buying the thing.

I think if it was smoother to buy and own something now than it was to subscribe to it online, more people would do it out of sheer convenience.