I used to be on the side of fontographers before webfonts became a thing. Want to use a particular font for your print/screen production? Just pay for a license fee -- sure you might have to pay per weight, style, or even seat -- but at least you got to use it for your graphical productions as much as you wanted. Enter webfonts and instead of letting those same bought license "rollover" to the new medium they created…
It's just a way to charge depending on the client's wallet. Standard practice in b2b, so let's be real: nothing new happened with web fonts in this regard.