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It was always going to be a rug pull, they basically took XBMC and ffmpeg, made a "cloud" based front end for it and started asking people for money.
At no point was it anything other then an attempt to cash in on pirates. At some point I guess they realized all those "lifetime" subscription purchases would dry up and they started Partnering with or buying up other streaming content so they could at least pretend to be offering something else but that can only get them so far financially.
It might have been short sighted rather then an intentional rug pull, but obviously running a service like Plex requires an constant stream of funding, and when your loyalist users are the ones who paid a relativly small lump sum early on, it gets harder and harder to keep revenue coming in from new users and monthly subscribers.
Yeah the problem with Plex is that it's initial user base was just people who wanted to stream their pirated content, and the problem with that is that these people are also unlikely to pay for a monthly subscription when open source free alternative exists. Their best bet is to become a sort of new Netflix by getting rights to stream from multiple studios, people are tired of having to subscribe to multiple streaming websites and dealing with some of their janky interfaces and most of these services don't allow local storage of episodes and movies which would significantly improve the quality of their content, if Plex could offer secure local storage and streaming of content from multiple sources I would pay a monthly subscription for it. The only alternative that provides this somewhat is Prime Video letting you purchase access to non Amazon content, but I don't want anything to do with Amazon.