Yes, it was. I'm sure the change with C1 was facilitated by Adobe's subscription - I can't imagine they'd have got away with it otherwise.
I think the C1 situation is complicated.
When I bought my perpetual license for C1 the cost was twice the cost of LR, and that was before C1 had a database as it was only competing with the ACR component of Photoshop. The main reasons that people bought C1 was for the quality of the raw processing and the superb technical support.
At some point they obviously decided to compete with LR and add the database tools, which may have coincided with them being majority owned by a British Venture capital company.
Then Adobe went subscription and LR started to get a poor reputation for processing Fuji films, both of which changed the C1 customer base (judged from the different type of support questions being asked on the Phase One forum and other photography forums).
A few years ago the British Venture Capital ownership was replaced with a Danish one, and there have been major changes at Phase One.
The software and hardware parts of the company have been split off into two companies, the C1 support system has been restructured to cope with a large user base, and for a couple of years has been very poor. Even though its dramatically improved recently, you still have to work through a series of boiler plate responses before being escalated to someone who "might" be able to help you. In the past I used to get a response within an hour from someone who was obviously a C1 expert (who also had a good knowledge of other software). And there has been a seemingly desperate rush to add new features, along with irritating bugs.
I certainly agree that the subscription issue will have increased interest in C1, but anecdotally many people seem to be put off by the C1 costs being a good bit higher than the Adobe sub costs, as well as still needing PS, or Affinity Photo at a further cost. I suspect its only the people who find the C1 raw processing and workflow worth the price that stay with it, and others look at other alternatives to Adobe.
My gut feeling is different to yours as I don't see how they can get away with being so expensive if they are trying to compete with Lightroom or other LR alternatives.