Live service and always online are two entirely different things, and the former isn’t inherently malicious, unlike the latter.

I’d, for example, consider all Paradox grand strategy games as live service with major updates dropping once or twice a year (followed by like twenty bugfix patches cause they fuck up every time, but that’s besides the point). Sure, every major update comes with a new dlc that isn’t exactly cheap, but you also get a lot of free content with each release. All their major titles are entirely different games now than they were at the 1.0 release.

What ubisoft does is just a tacked on battle pass that gets a few worthless items/skins so they can call it live service and have a justification for their always online verification model. That’s purely an anti piracy measure that fucks legitimate players more than pirates.