That’s because you’re the lowly consumer. Things make total sense if you look at it from Sinclair’s shitty money-grubbing CEO’s cold, dead, reptilian eyes.
Well, they are just the ones holding the bag in this current environment. They bought these stations at the wrong time since the usual players in cable/sat have been bleeding subscribers. It doesn't necessarily make sense now for these companies to pay the carriage fees for the RSNs. On the flip side, do the streaming services have enough subs to carry these stations while maintaining a cost benefit low enough for people to want to cut the cord? Looks like they don't so they keep raising their prices as well or, in the case of YTTV, dropping the RSNs while also raising the price which is a curious business model.
Everyone sucks, not just Sinclair. DISH hasn't lowered my monthly cost even though they are no longer paying for the RSNs and Sinclair needs to make a return on its investment so they won't just give it away. Selling the naming rights to Bally's helps give them some sort of return but I feel like DISH will never have them back. The obvious move going forward is to make the local RSNs an a la carte deal but Sinclair and the other RSN owners will resist that for as long as possible. Existing cable/sat users that don't care about sports are done with subsidizing the sports networks and the cable/sat companies don't want to piss them off. I feel like they could put a pretty good premium on the RSNs and us sports fans would pay it.
Hell, DISH said goodbye to HBO like two years ago and it is never coming back. They aren't wrong either. If I can pay HBO directly for HBO via streaming, why should DISH pay HBO for it and hope that all of its subs choose to pay for HBO through DISH rather than on their own. It just sucks that we, the consumers, don't have the option of just paying Sinclair $14.99 a month to stream the local RSN like we can with HBO.
It seems like the leagues and teams should get involved since it isn't good for business if nobody sees your games. These teams aren't enjoying tv deals like the Dodgers and Lakers where they took the money for limited availability: they signed the deals in a world where every outlet offered the channels.