It sounds like a lot, yeah. I'm not trying to sell it to you here (I personally abandoned it after one 3-month trial) but like
@Eckhart von Glan said you have to factor in how much time you use it for. Once you do that, it looks a lot less crazy.
You can dip your toe in the water for some small initial fee (right now, 3 months is only $16.50 for a new member). Then, if you like it, you renew your membership and buy tracks and cars when you wish. If you spend even just 200 hours a year using it, and spend a total of a few hundred bucks buying ALL of the content (not even compulsory) then you clearly have a small hourly cost, in the ballpark of $2 per hour. Many people will play it far more than that, and of course you only buy the content once. Hence Eckhart's ongoing hourly cost is about a quarter of what I just estimated.
How much would it cost you per hour to drive a kart around the crappy local track designed for 12-year-olds? My crappy local track would charge me around £50/hour.
I have already spent over 300 hours on Dirt Rally, which cost me a little over £20. That's stupidly cheap. LFS cost me a similar amount and god alone knows how many hundred hours I have spent on it (probably well over 1000). At that stage the hourly cost of the game is meaningless. You could even be paying more for the
electricity to run your rig! (And don't forget the size of the investment you have to make in the rig itself... GPU and wheel for example.) And because the cost per hour of iRacing is much higher, it looks really big, but remember it's really big compared to something
stupidly small.