When panel costs dominate the difference in installation costs between residential and utility scale solar don’t matter as much. Those subsidies encouraged investment and helped drive down the cost of panels in the long run by expanding the market.

Now that panels are cheap the installation costs dominate. Residential installation is basically never going to get substantially cheaper so it no longer makes sense to subsidise such systems when the subsidy alone would pay for more efficiently installed utility scale solar.

It seems like we should shift the subsidy to expansion of grid connectivity as that now seems to be the blocker for projects.