It’s no more ‘punishing’ to new subs than the old system is where at times new subs missed seeing the alert for them pop up because it happened while the user just finished submitting their payment and hadn’t yet returned to the stream. Also it is not entirely uncommon for people to sub when a stream is offline so that it doesn’t cause an alert, or subbed at a bad point (ie, during pre-show lead up to a stream where alerts aren’t active, during a break, or interrupting a key part of gameplay), so even for those who DO want to show their sub can now do so at a more convenient time.
I agree that the current method isn’t very intuitive and I’ve even seen streamers have issues as it was never made clear to them either how subs would work and that a page refresh might be needed. People are catching on though and I’m seeing it become less of an issue in the channels I’m on as viewers and streamers now know how it works.