This is certainly a big part of it, but it's not the whole story.

For one thing, there were ways to achieve those business models with native software too - "web-based=subscription" isn't actually a requirement, or the only way to go.

But users in the early 2000s, many of them more technical than users today, rejected this idea. It felt like native apps had to cost money one time, and doing otherwise would be wrong. But with Web, since users understood that it was hosted elsewhere, it "made sense" for it to be a subscription, so users went with it.

This also affected the technical things as well. Auto-updating was incredibly frowned upon in the 2000s - you bought it, you got to keep it as-is. So companies had to work very hard to keep multiple versions working all the time.

Most of these biases by technical users have gone away. We now have auto-updating subscription native apps, e.g. Photoshop works that way today. But these technical biases drove the usage of the web, because it was so much technically easier for businesses, and allowed much better business models.

(And, and this isn't even getting into the whole "installing software was really hard for users" thing!)