Pretty much all software companies now have ongoing costs associated with the software after you would have purchased it - ops, hosting, security updates, and backports for compatability. In order to sell it to you and have it make sense they'd need to charge you a lot for it - the cost of keeping it up for however long you might use it. Essentially you'd need to pay ten years worth of subscription costs and just not have a choice in the matter. I'm sure they would prefer that, but you wouldn't buy it at that price because you know you probably won't use it for that long. Also, maintaining multiple versions of the thing is going to be a lot more expensive than just getting everyone on the current version. So, the company which has ongoing costs charges you an ongoing bill because it makes the most sense for both of you.
I think that maybe what you really don't like is the fact that US monopolies are not regulated and so all of your options suck whether or not they are SaaS companies.
No. SaaS has wormed it's way into your brain at such a deep level that you believe that "ops, hosting, security updates, and backports for compatability" are necessary to have high quality reliable software. None of that is true. Software can be written to just work on a machine you install it on. My copy of Adobe CS6 still works just fine, software doesn't just stop working on it's own. There are no ongoing maintenance costs for multiple versions. It works just fine installing off the same media it did 10 years ago. Security updates are not really necessary if your software runs in autistic mode.
The reason you believe these things is because people build software in stupid ways in order to justify ongoing costs. Cloud-first software architecture is something you do because you want to collect rents, and then you try to write good software DESPITE it. It's not a sound technical choice for most of the software that goes that route.
I think that maybe what you really don't like is the fact that US monopolies are not regulated and so all of your options suck whether or not they are SaaS companies.