Price locking people out not being a valid argument doesn’t follow from developers needing to charge X to break even. Both things can be true simultaneously. A developer can need that price to survive and that price can still lock people out who then pirate it. Thus is exactly why I played many free to play mmos because I simply didn’t have money to afford monthly subscriptions. Price can absolutely be a barrier to entry.The behavior under constraint isn’t invalidated by the price being justified.

GOG exists, it’s viable, and its entire model was built on DRM-free releases. If DRM-free were commercially impossible it wouldn’t exist at all. The fact that some publishers now include DRM on GOG is a publisher choice, not a market requirement. GOG itself doesn’t mandate it and has historically pushed back against it. If there was no market for it, GOG wouldn’t be in a position to push against anything.

Health codes still apply to restaurants even though nobody compels you to eat out. That’s also a luxury. Consumer protection frameworks apply to discretionary purchases all the time. (Though in the US that’s actively being rolled back and people are ending up sick more often.) Luxury status doesn’t make restrictive or deceptive practices acceptable, it just means you can opt out of the product entirely, which is exactly what people are doing when they pirate or stop buying.

DRM absolutely follows authroritarian logic. I’m using the term to mean unilateral control exercised over something you’ve purchased without your meaningful consent or recourse. The mechanism is the same regardless of what you call it. You paid for access, the terms of that access get changed without your input, and you have no meaningful remedy. That dynamic doesn’t become acceptable because the product is a game rather than something essential.