A 5% increase is still a sizable when you consider the number of licenses that even an SMB may have. I don't deal with our MS licensing directly at $DAYJOB, but we've got something like 1300+ employees most (all?) of whom have M365 E5 licenses, that adds up to (roughly) an extra $4K/mo or $48K/yr when it comes time to renew our annual licensing.

Is it going to break the bank and send us into a financial death spiral? Absolutely not. But, you get enough companies deciding to jack up pricing at around the same time and it comes out to a significant increase in our lights-on budget - death by a million cuts hurts just as much as Broadcom raking us over the coals with VMWare license increases.

5% is 5%. If you have more employees, you also presumably have more revenue. That's why percentages rather than absolutes are the right metric. And keeping up with inflation isn't "jacking up pricing".