Gracenote - planned obsolescence?

I have been using iTunes (although it's now called Music) for years, have an iTunes Match subscription and have been ripping my CDs (which I buy quite a lot of) into iTunes (Music) and playing them on my different devices (iPad, iPhone) happily. Since a year or so, Music no longer is able to connect to the GraceNote database. I see that various people have been plagued by this issue for quite some time. No structural solution seems forthcoming (all my systems are up-to-date; I use MacOs Sonoma on a 2020 iMac). It seems clear Apple does not want to actually solve this.

Is it strange to assume that Apple is no longer interested in maintaining this service because ripping physical CDs is seen as outdated, and they would rather have all of us take a Music streaming subscription instead? Forcing people to manually enter CD track info every time they want to rip something seems like a sneaky way to achieve that. It is extremely annoying, and, I fear, one of the little things that will eventually push me away from Apple products altogether.