Yes. The utilities want every household to pay them every month.

Here in California, PG&E has a "base service fee" of $24/month. That you owe even if they sell you no (as in ZERO) electricity:

https://www.pge.com/en/account/billing-and-assistance/base-s...

Seems reasonable if you want to be connected to it.

The grid costs a significant amount of money to build and maintain, and maintaining the available capacity to serve you electricity even if you only use it a couple months of the year (or even a couple days of the year) still costs money.

If you don't want to be connected to it at all - then I mostly feel you shouldn't be mandated to be.

Yep, totally, and I'd personally be overjoyed if I could pay PG&E (hypothetically; they're not my utility) $24/month to keep the grid afloat, but no more than that because I'm producing all I need locally (at the risk of repeating myself, I know this is possible today. Just hopeful that over time it becomes possible to do that install in a plug and play fashion just like you can do with the balcony solar, but at whole-house scale (or at least some material fraction of the whole house usage)).