Mandatory subscription apple music for synching libraries

I am fond of music. Many years back I have ripped a large part of my hard copy CD collection. I was able to stream this in my car from any apple device for many years thereafter without any issue. Recently I couldn’t stream certain songs I wanted to listen to on spotify, so I looked on my iphone’s itunes library for the song spotify did not have. It wasn’t there.. So after some research, I checked my macbook (all music was on there), verified that I had sufficient storage space on my iphone and checked all boxes to copy/stream my entire (original and paid for!) itunes library, but it did not work! I had to buy a n apple music subscription to enable this full sync function between my Macbook library and my iphone.

Only untill recently it did not really occur to me that this is a pretty wrong way of conducting business by our friends from Apple. I am hooked on their products, but feel screwed for suddenly having to pay an annual fee to have services on my two multi thousand euro costing devices that I was always enjoying for free.

@Apple please set me straight here or give me some reasonable advice