Making it take some pain for developers is precisely what makes it valuable. If you could automate signing up for a developer account and didn’t have to put up some cash it would lose all value as a trust signal.

The cash part is not even the worst, even if this is obviously ridiculous for free/open source projects.

The bad UX is really what irks me. Enough that I may entirely opt-out of the Apple ecosystem forever, and I don't think I am the only one feeling that way.