It's what Adobe does. That's not the same as saying it works for them, and it definitely isn't the same as saying it's the optimal pricing model for them. You have no way of knowing whether they'd make more or less money by moving to a different strategy. Copying what someone does without understanding how it works for them or why they did it is literally the definition of cargo cult behaviour. That's usually a bad idea.
Photoshop is a legendary piece of software when it comes to things of a visual nature, so legendary that they essentially had an annual subscription to use it since there were frequent new releases that a lot of folks felt compelled to grab to keep with the curb.
I think they tend to get a little too much credit for the subscription switch since their users were already being abused in such a manner. Office to Office360 is the one that's always astounded me. Very few people upgraded office outside of getting a new machine and most businesses tried to pin all of their users to a particular version of office (it was more important that everyone used the same version rather than everyone using the latest version) and, additionally, people weren't actually used to "paying" for microsoft stuff with actual cash. Generally the software you got from MSFT was bundled into the system when you purchased it, and while your money certainly ended up in MSFT's pockets you didn't directly interact with them.
I use my pirated copy of photoshop5 (I think) from 20 years ago for my infrequent uses of photoshop. But I have friends who use photoshop every day and pay their monthly fee, and are pretty happy.