I think for certs, you are not better of paying $5 for the cert, than paying nothing to get an LE cert. It is already "subsidized" into cheapness, and the $5 company will bug you with ads for EV certs and whatnot in order to make a profit off you somehow since you are now a customer.
What I think LE did was to gather the required bag of money that any cert issuer needs to pony up to get the infra up and validated, and then skipped the $5 part and just run on donations. So while LE might stop tomorrow, you don't have any good guarantees that the $5 cert company will last longer if their sidebusiness goes under, and if you go to a $100 cert company, you are just getting scammed from some company who soon will realize that most certs are being given away and that they can't prove why their $100 certs are "better" in any meaningful way so they will also be at risk of going under. In all these cases, you get to use your cert for whatever validity period you had, and then rush over to the next issuer, whoever that is left when the pay-for-certs business tanks.
As opposed to cars or whatever, you can't really put more "quality math" into the certs so they last longer, the CAs have limits on how long they are allowed to last, so no more 10-year certs for public services anyhow. You might aswell get the cheapest of the ones that are still valid and useful (ie, exists in browser CA lists) and LE is one of those. Might be more (zerossl?) but same argument would hold for those. The CA list is curated by the browser teams lots better than me or you shopping around websites that make weird claims on why their certs are worth paying $100 for.
What I think LE did was to gather the required bag of money that any cert issuer needs to pony up to get the infra up and validated, and then skipped the $5 part and just run on donations. So while LE might stop tomorrow, you don't have any good guarantees that the $5 cert company will last longer if their sidebusiness goes under, and if you go to a $100 cert company, you are just getting scammed from some company who soon will realize that most certs are being given away and that they can't prove why their $100 certs are "better" in any meaningful way so they will also be at risk of going under. In all these cases, you get to use your cert for whatever validity period you had, and then rush over to the next issuer, whoever that is left when the pay-for-certs business tanks.
As opposed to cars or whatever, you can't really put more "quality math" into the certs so they last longer, the CAs have limits on how long they are allowed to last, so no more 10-year certs for public services anyhow. You might aswell get the cheapest of the ones that are still valid and useful (ie, exists in browser CA lists) and LE is one of those. Might be more (zerossl?) but same argument would hold for those. The CA list is curated by the browser teams lots better than me or you shopping around websites that make weird claims on why their certs are worth paying $100 for.