Hello! I understand your frustration and you are correct that subtitles are often bad, especially these days when companies are skipping the professionals altogether and opting for automatically generated garbage.
That said! I'm a professional translator and, in my training in university, had to take a full year of audiovisual translation, and there's a few challenges that translate (heh) to same-language captioning and subtitling that I'd like to address, even though translation is a whole different beast on its own.
Specifically, I would like to address the claim that "Scripted media has absolutely no excuse for not having subtitles or having subtitles that aren't perfectly verbatim."
This is, unfortunately, false, and it is a result of human and technical limitations both, even when you cut out corporate idiocy.
On the matter of "not having subtitles," understand that timing the subtitles to film is a form of skilled professional work that takes hours to complete. It is not a matter of automation, someone has to sit down and mark the beginning and end time of a subtitle line and then put the line to be shown into whatever software they're using. It should ALWAYS be done, however, and on that point I do think you're right.
Now, onto the "verbatim" part, which is the more important one, imo.
Firstly, every company that makes their own subtitles has their own rules in terms of what the upper limit for characters per subtitle is (iirc Netflix was 42? But the number ranges between 35 and 42 characters total per line). You might think this sounds like a dumb limitation. Why not just take the script and stick it verbatim into the subs, like you suggested?
The answer is human limitation. As it turns out, people can talk a lot faster than they can read, and this still holds true for audiovisual media. What an actor can say in 10 seconds is far more than a person can read in 10 seconds, and this impacts what can go on the subs.
The second, subsidiary answer to this question is technical limitation. Each subtitle line has to be shown on screen for a set amount of time for people to be able to read it. Have you ever encountered a line or sub that went by too fast and you missed it completely? It happens a lot, specifically due to trying to push the upper limit of what you can fit into a subtitle and the lower limit of how long you can show it on screen before moving on.
This results in a lot of the "fluff" in scripts to be cut out in favor of legibility and conveying the message of what's being said in a way that actually fits the technical and human limitations that come with subtitling. It also results in a whole lot of paraphrasing to save character count so you can fit the entire dialog in the subs in the time that the dialog actually lasts, which is pretty important if you ask me.
Another thing I'd like to address is tone. Being on the internet, we all know that tone can make or break a line, and sometimes it's better to unfold sarcasm (say, "Nice weather" when it's raining becomes "Shit weather we're having") to keep things from getting confusing. You might think that audiences aren't stupid, and you would be right, because this does often come across as patronizing, so it ultimately comes down to style, but I know I've seen a bunch of subs that wouldn't make sense if I weren't also hearing the tone in the actors' voices.
Relatedly, scripts all have tone cues and other emotional indicators for actors (and voice actors and dubbers!) to base their acting on, which obviously can't be included in the subtitles unless you're thoroughly close-captioning, which is also a different beast in and of itself.
Finally, and again on the physical/technical limitations of subtitles, there are style guides for each company in terms of what is and isn't allowed. For example, it is considered good form for the top subtitle to be shorter than the bottom one for legibility, and while I was studying I was instructed to make an effort to keep it that way and get into that habit. Another example in this vein is that, a few decades back, the standard practice was to end a sub with an ellipsis if the line kept going in the next sub, and that practice has since fallen out of use, mostly for reasons relating to the economy of characters. There are also style rules in terms of how you can and can't cut lines, both top to bottom and sub to sub, specifically for legibility and for grammatical reasons.
Ultimately, you are right that the quality of subtitles is often horrendous, and this is often a combination of corpo skipping professionals AND of professionals being grossly underpaid and asked to complete work on laughably short time frames, which ultimately impacts the end product. BUT! There are very real technical limitations to why a script can't be included verbatim in subtitles, and it's important to also keep these in mind when we get the "that's not what they SAID" impulse, so long as it's not a "mistranslation" and the gist and meaning of the conversation is preserved.
All of this to say, I also used to get incredibly mad about the paraphrasing and felt like it was bullshit that lines weren't being kept verbatim, until I had to take a class on subtitling, captioning and dubbing myself and fully understood why some things are the way they are. (Other things... well, it comes down to corporate greed and wanting to push something out as soon as possible instead of giving it the time necessary to be done properly, and THAT sucks major balls.)
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