People here are consumers too. To give my anecdata:
I used to subscribe to the NYT and made the mistake of not subscribing using Apple's subscriptions mechanism. When I wanted to cancel for a while, I had to go through a whole spiel with their sales rep to get them to honor my cancellation. With other subscription services on Apple (like many the TV streaming subscriptions) cancelling is a couple of standard clicks and you're done. No questions asked. I've cancelled and re-subscribed to thing like HBO multiple times because of it, but I will never be resubscribing to the NYT again.
I don't want 90 different ways to cancel 90 different subscriptions from 90 different stores for 90 different apps on my phone, so yeah I do appreciate having one place to do it, and I wish it were harder for developers to skirt the App Store infrastructure to push their own consumer-hostile options.
As a signifier of technological anti-establishment thinking I think that label is pretty meaningless at this point.
Most of the "Hackers" of my generation grew up to either vacuum up user data without their consent, micro-target advertising (including political propaganda), or fund those that do the above two things.
But I am a customer too. For example, a couple months ago an, ad got my mom to install an app without her consent. She said she could not escape the page until she clicked okay, and she wasn’t aware the app had installed at all. I noticed because I started receiving charges for a subscription to the app services. A simple chat with Apple support granted me a reimbursement.
As a customer, Apple treats me well. I understand where tons of developers are coming from, but as a customer I haven’t had a better experience.