This is true, but is Photoshop today improved so much since Photoshop from 2016? At least for me is not, as I only use Illustrator sparingly and Photoshop a few times a week.

Don't get me wrong I do love Photoshop, but between their new updates for the Cloud, slower performance, longer startup time... it feels like highway robbery. I have purchase AESprite that is a great tool that I would upgrade too as well. I am still sore that Adobe killed Flash, Macromedia use to be a real competitive rival to Adobe... they should have never been allowed to merge as companies (but that is a different topic).

For subscription, anything that uses the cloud for processing will need a subscription, otherwise you literally lose money. Keep in mind it is expensive to leverage AWS/Azure for backend processing.

I do use and pay for Delphi from Embarcadero and they give pricing for both like Adobe use to (they are very fair).