I found myself writing exactly like this for a while after reading pages and pages of this special construct before my bs detector understood what it is...
Seems like everybody an their mothers are using max plans these days. I wouldn't be surprised if LTV of each customer was big enough to justify spending.
Travel industry especially OTA behemoths like booking or expedia live by exploiting all possible quirks of the systems. For example they could snap super cheap airline promo fares but manipulate it to keep it in an open state for months similarly to how agents wait till the payment clears. Would be than sold with massive profit or abandoned close to flight date without any penalties. Apparently they rotted enough for start blatantly cancelling hotel bookings.
It can be legal and tightly controlled at the same time. Here in my European country it's perfectly legal to prescribe opiates but after 3rd prescription (regardless of what opiate it was) a patient has to go for mandatory psychiatric evaluation. This has put potential opiate abuser on the radar in a meaningful way. Legalisation doesn't mean free for all just like alcohol.
Never underestimate bragging rights in gamers community. Majority of us run unoptimized systems with that one great piece of gear and as long as the game runs at decent FPS and we have some bragging rights it's all ok.