I don’t think it justifies putting remote streams as a whole behind a paywall. But I suspect that the feature is very widely used since it makes remote streams work out of the box regardless of your setup. It’s also turned on by default.
Requiring a subscription for remote access is actually fucking insane, they don’t have any bandwidth costs associated with that other than authentication so ???
They have provided a free relay service for years that makes it possible to access a server even if there are things in the way like CGNAT. That service had a low bandwidth limit but undoubtedly cost them money, so yes. But yes, they should have just moved that feature entirely to Plex pass (there is already a higher bandwidth limit for Plex pass users)
Browser apps are very annoying though. The support for some codecs (like HEVC) is usually worse in a browser.
So true. But I can’t complain that the software is getting better.