History is filled with examples of people believing "they would never do that", then they do "that", and those same people act really surprised that "it" happened.

All it would take is a new CEO or new CFO that has a different idea about how the business should be run, and just like that, everything you are used to and thought would never happen, happens.

I personally don't like the subscription model and have little need to get the latest minor software tweak. I have no need for Photoshop. Gimp works for me. I am still using Lightroom 4.4. I don't recall exactly what I paid for it (probably about $80), but if I were subscribing for $10/month, I would have paid multiple hundreds of dollars for software that cost me $80. At some point I will probably be forced to subscribe. Until then, I'm saving $10/month.

I rarely change the White balance. I leave it on daylight nearly all the time. It works well for sunsets; I don't want to correct light in a sunset. I want it warm, orange-yellow.
If the colour balance is a little off, I correct it in Lightroom usually using one of the presets and then tweeking it slightly.
I know of no rule that says the light balance has to be "Correct." There are however two situations in which colour balance is fussy; product photography and portraiture. For many companies, the colour is part of the trademark. No model wants you to make her/him look like they are from a different race or worse from some exoplanet.