That's a fair take. The pricing model has changed dramatically since I last looked at it, but at the same time, the dev has obviously put a lot of thought into these changes, so I find it difficult to fault him. He's gotta make a living somehow.
In general, if someone has more than one Proxmox node to manage, chances are they've got some type of homelab, which isn't exactly the cheapest hobby out there to begin with. If XPipe enhances their experience, I'd say that's worth a few bucks. If not, they can always git gud in the terminal and do the legwork themselves, but time = $, so...
https://pulpproject.org/
Does docker, pypi, apt, ansible galaxy, etc. I use it at work as part of our undercloud for OpenStack. It's the go-to for StackHPC, too.