What's up with the monetization of some modern RTS?

I've played RTS all my live a some years ago I went back to the multiplayer side of the genre with AoE 2 & CoH 2. Some time later AoE 4. No complains here.

My surprise came when I was looking at modern war RTS today in 2026.

I started playing Warno and there's already around 130€ on DLC and most of them only add multiplayer divisions with very few new units. So around 60-70€ per year.

But then I looked at CoH3 and it's the same. Each DLC is 20€ but it only adds some multiplayer stuff. Like a few units & abilities. It's also 50-60€ per year of DLCs.

Worst thing is, if you want to be competitive in multiplayer there's the feeling that you need to buy this stuff.

Even AoE4 that has a better DLC policy (cheaper prices, more content, single player, etc...) also has a suspicious amount of DLC civs with higher winrates than usual.

I understand that they need money to keep developing but at this point it feels like a hidden subscription model to be able to play multiplayer, the problem is that if you start to play the game late in time, it's kinda of overwhelming.

Also the general lack of good single player content in expansions it's sad. I'm worried that some RTS will end up with the "Paradox" model of DLCs.