> as long as people would commit to subscription-paywalled based services

Do support contracts for enterprise level hardware count as such?

SAN equipment, storage systems, servers, etc... are all coming with these and quite often you can't even download drivers and firmware without active subscription. Replacing failed components is a hassle or impossible as well. Everything is licensed, sometimes with recurring costs.

Some of it can be somewhat mitigated with turning to open source solutions but usually it just offsets costs from vendor to your own staff as you need to have more and better qualified sysadmins to support them.