I bet if you made dating apps paid upfront at a lower price than premium subscriptions (e.g. $10/month rather than $20/month on other apps), you'd still get a ton of users as people are willing to pay for a way to find love, and you'd get your much desired revenue. And you wouldn't have to deal as much with enshittification. The only other problem to solve is the 90/10 rule - where 90% of the women are only interested in 10% of the men.
I worked at eHarmony in 2009 and we had a monitor in the office which showed user complaints. Apparently, the business people had A/B tested and determined that the additional revenue from ads outweighed the annoyance that users experienced (I actually asked directly about this). The other thing was the large number of people who were frustrated by the low density of users in their geographical region. Spending a lot of time with user data as a developer was kind of depressing as a significant part of their user base was divorced people who were recovering from alcoholism or drug addiction.
Dating apps already have this problem, but a subscription really incentivizes the app to never let you find the right person. Because if you do, they lose a subscriber.
Charging a subscription at all creates a perverse incentive to never give you a good match. As soon as you find a good match, you cancel your sub and stop paying.
