Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you put it like that, yeah, mobile app pricing is messed up. Compare that to desktop programs like Adobe Creative Cloud, which costs more than $500 a year. Or console games, where the console costs about $300 (Switch Lite) and a single game costs almost $100. (All priced CAD, rounded.)
It all depends on perspective. From my point of view, Adobe's pricing is definitely messed up and I know a few people who are still using pre-CC versions because they don't want to pay for a subscription, especially if they only use Photoshop occasionaly. On a similar note, I pay on average 5USD per (PC) game by tracking sales and would only consider paying more than 10USD for new games that I want to play really bad…
I've been busy the last two decades too. I've built websites, used CAD to design and machine dozens of physical objects, designed circuit boards, wrote and compiled software, made music, simulated chemical reactions, created and edited text documents, converted files from all sorts of formats to other formats, deployed databases with millions of rows, run two small businesses, and sent and received thousands of communications over myriad channels. All using free and open source software.
If there's something I want to do with a computer and I can't find a free solution that does it I write new code to accomplish my task (but honestly, this almost never happens these days).