If they'll do it once, they'll do it again. Moved to Altium and although it was expensive, it was a 1-off cost for a permanent license, and I got ~20 years of use out of Eagle, if I amortize the cost over the same time period it's not so bad - and it's orders of magnitude better, even if that does come with a steeper learning curve.
Friends don't let friends use Autodesk software.
Someone else has even gone through the hassle of archiving multiple older versions of EAGLE for people to use: https://archive.org/details/eagle_202210
I considered going to Altium after Autodesk bought EAGLE but the lack of usable tools led me to KiCad. I bit the bullet and just learned as much as I could and have been helping others in my local area learn KiCad as best they can. Is KiCad perfect? No, but it's good enough for CERN to build stuff with and it's far and above better than some of the upstart open source schematic capture/pcb tools out there.
Since EAGLE's death, we've had a slow trickle of newcomers to the scene, which has really been awesome. KiCad 6 really blows some of its predecessors out of the water. I still need to learn how to manipulate the s-exp formatting that the libraries use so that I can merge parts/libraries together from some of the import tools for LCSC though.
It's worked well for me, and can use libraries from Digikey and open source contributors.
Libre has a fairly Eagle-like UI with a slightly saner parts creation process. I'm a big fan.
