It's not actually subsidized and the economics of smaller/self-hosted models are a much, much, worse nightmare (source: guy who spent last 2 years maintaining llama.cpp && any provider you can think of) (why is it bad? same reason why 20 cars vs. 1 bus is bad. same reason why only being able to use transportation if you own a car would be bad)
Source on it being subsidized? :)
(there isn't one, other than an aggro subset of people lying to eachother that somehow literally everyone is losing money, while posting record profit margins)
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor)