i guess economically i can think of it as people who can actually afford software subsidizing it for the masses, in some kind of a janky cross-subsidy scheme.

Take it from someone who has been a software engineer for almost fifteen years. The distribution of wealth within software companies, especially large ones, is so whack that the actual people who do the work see barely any money from product sales. And for enterprise version of windows? Don't worry actual corporations buying licenses are spending orders of magnitude more money on bulk licensing than you would if you could have bought a single user license yourself.