> I'm not sure if they're irrational. Payment/subscription fatigue is a thing.
Payment fatigue is an irrational thing, at least in the context of what a rational economic agent is. Rationally, you pay for what you value, at roughly what it is valued to you, and you don't pay for you want you don't value. Transactions are fatiguing precisely because we are not rational agents. Humans live primarily on emotion and ingrained behavior, with small bursts of applying logic.
This does not sound like an accurate description of "rational agents". A rational agent may value something less because of a perceived second-order effect (e.g. "If I accept a price hike, there will be more price hikes in the future"). There's nothing non-rational about that.
In general, the "rational agent" abstraction is so flexible it can represent almost any real-world behaviour (which is why it's a bad model, not that humans are fundamentally irrational in some way).
It's not the core idea of "fatigue of paying for value" itself but something more akin to "fatigue of keeping track of which things were actually worth paying for, which starts to take more value than you can create with the same amount of time or could get with a few well thought out larger payments". It's usually brought up around subscriptions precisely because they are a lot of work to track but easy to forget.
What if what I value is that something is not corrupted by monetary incentives?