The yearly subscription is for publishing your app on Apple’s store and definitely helps keep some garbage out. Running your own app on your own device is basically solved with free third party solutions now (see AltStore and since a newer method I can’t recall atm)
Notice that parent never talked about publishing apps, just building and running apps on their own device. "Publishing on AltStore" (or permanently running the app on your own device in any other way) still requires a $100/year subscription as far as I'm aware.
