Even paying customers aren’t guaranteed feature priority. Have you even seen Windows outside of EU markets? You pay well over $100 for a license, and they shove a wheelbarrow’s worth of ads and data extraction up your ass. See also: the cableification of streaming services. (EDIT: Oh, and I forgot about Adobe!)
The Internet Economy doesn’t need a freemium model to be shit. In fact some of the worse SaaS I interact with on a daily basis is also extremely expensive.
It’s got everything to do with misaligned financial incentives already plaguing traditional markets (pursuit of infinite growth, short term thinking, etc.) compounded by how quick and easy software is to change and update which yields very high feature bloat and a much faster cycle of enshittification.