It’s like they are trying to irritate people into canceling their accounts.
Imo, this one might actually be worse than the account sharing and cause people to quit. As soon as you have people messing around with their subscription version, it’s all too easy to just say “nah, I actually don’t want this anymore”.
After some discussion with the Minister for War and Finance (my wife), we agreed I had a modest budget (~$300AUD) to spend on some old enterprise servers, which I did.
But I’ve seen plenty of posts where people are getting away with their old gaming rigs, and the like.
I’ve got a PC that my job was throwing out and I put a CPU, hard drive and RAM combo I got on Craigslist (that’s like gumtree) for $20USD in there and I’ve only ever had problems with 4k and HDR. Plex itself is pretty cheap perf-wise! Transcoding can be a problem but you can set it up to pre-transcode multiple quality options or just stream it original quality if you have the bandwidth.