However to the general point, having been in this industry for close to 20 years now, unnecessary complexity and constantly changing frameworks and conventions for little to no gain is stressful.

"For example, many Canadians under 35 are unlikely ever to be able to buy a place to live. The fallout from this decline in living standards will be exacerbated by the fact that the difference between the extremes of wealth is greater now in developed countries than it has been at any time in several generations."

It applies to Canada and the UK. This changes things massively. Inheritance matters more than hard work. Of course there will be some who excel more than others, become millionaires etc and will be fine, but it's still a fundamental shift when the average/median person cannot.

Subscription vs one-time payment (+ maintenance/updates payments) are two ways off offering to pay.

Freemium just means offering a free tier to let users try the software and offering a way to upgrade to unlock features on paid plans.

B2C vs B2B is business to customer vs business to business.

SaaS is software as a service, as opposed to say installing an application on premise in a data center.

A startup could be offering a fremium B2C SaaS for example, or a freemium B2B SaaS.

Speaking specifically to test automation I find that most companies simply prefer to make the calculation that they'll take the risk of an issue occurring over investing in test automation (and testing in general) until the problems become so large and financially catastrophic, or a regulatory issue, that it gets embarrassing for a VP/Exec and then the decision is made to properly invest. That's not an ideal approach because building this out as you go is more efficient.

The typical other problems are how best to shape the testing pyramid. Having large number of unit tests > medium number of integration tests and a small number of end-to-end tests is always proposed but I find in most cases the pyramid becomes inverted due to the natural issues associated with problems really being only of concern if they actually impact an end user and the end-to-end issues cast a wide net even though they are very challenging to maintain and do require appropriate investment in resources.

I want to mention Tesults (https://www.tesults.com) with which I am involved to tackle another issue. Clarity around test results and what is actually being tested due to bad reporting and trouble accessing relevant results data. Understanding testing across the systems for a team is essential to knowing what's actually running, how often and what the output is. This helps understand what additional testing may be needed and identifying what's failing.

Overall, most of the issues related to test automation stem from the calculation made too often mentioned above.