yeah, mikroc has it own sets of issues starting from the IDE and what the IDE let you do (things could have improved in the past few years but i'm not going to hold my breath)
IMHO XC8 still provides the best optimization and least bugs.
I think i NEVER used the PRO version so i'm not really concerned about this change but, in principle, i am worried too.
unfortunately microchip is driven by cow milkers, which is why we have to pay for higher optmiziations
and the guys in the engineering team fought really, really hard to convince the upper levels to give up -O2 for free, which happened about one year ago.
Another thing that scares me is that it is an indicator that they are increasing the amount of control done over the internet. This became apparent some months ago after the release of MPLABX 5.35.. a bug in their servers rendered the thing useless for a complete work day because apparently it tries to fetch the list of supported parts and tools at launch..