I’ve had this same concern myself. This isn’t to discount the value of subspecies as a concept in certain areas (botany, as we keep hearing on this thread). But there’s definitely a very broad use case for subspecies on iNat that is completely meaningless. For example, I see my butterflies get range-based subspecies IDs added all the time. If my country only has one subspecies, and the basis for IDing it to that subspecies is nothing beyond “it’s in your country”, that adds no value to the observation. I know every Monarch in Canada is the “migratory” subspecies, whether they’re labeled that way or not. The only “inconsistency” that I find mildly annoying is that half the observations say “Monarch” and half say “Migratory Monarch”, and the only difference is that half of them were ID’d by folks who like subspecies and half weren’t.
I get that it’s a different story when you’re talking about subspecies with overlapping ranges and anatomical differences that may be ecologically distinct. But just as I recognize that subspecies IDs are sometimes useful, I hope others can recognize that there is sometimes a downside to them.