They'd all rather receive the money from happy customers enthusiastically paying because they love the service so much, but if the third option is no money they all know what their second choice would be.

I'd agree that I don't think it's a majority that are bad actors, but I'd say it's far more then one or two, and atleast enough to impact the decisions users are making. I'd prefer this kind of subscription management functionality was handled via bank accounts, but until that's possible I'll probably keep using the app stores

I find it difficult to agree with this – and I'm not just being scattergun cynical. I quite literally think that the vast majority of consumer-facing businesses work as hard as they can to juice more money out of their customers through obfuscation.

It's easy to argue that this is a benefit for developers, or open ecosystems, or just plain principles or whatever, because that's all almost certainly true. But it's also probably virtually certainly no better for users.

Doesn't matter. There are enough of them to cause headaches for many people on a regular basis.