That's because digital media licensing is a whole circus. We aren't talking of using someone else's likeness or characters. What if Microsoft Office decides that they will charge retroactively about every file previously created with those tools regardless of what compensation they may already have agreed to and received? Does that seem even remotely reasonable in the least?

Do publishing houses need to pay leases to printer manufacturers per page printed on top of their own material costs? Do they need to pay every time a new reader opens the book the first time?

It's not reasonable to just go "the company said so, therefore this is how it has to work", that's just being a chump.