I signed up almost eight years ago and the last time I logged in was ~five years ago.

My question is;

Has Subeta's economy gone to complete garbage like Gaia's has, or is there still some hope of me growing out of my pleb-tier wardrobe?

I don't think it will take long to find the answers to these questions.

Some things have gotten more expensive, some have gotten cheaper. I think a good many things are still affordable though, especially if you do quests every day and save.

ive found a decent-ish way to get a lot of basic wears (a lot of which are actually really nice now imho) is to just vend the crap out of the OD vending machine

Yeah that's what I've noticed from the looking around I did, overall things aren't too bad and it looks like it's all stayed in a pretty good middle ground..

Yeah, it's not too bad. I've never played on Gaia, but I had a couple of friends who did and I remember them sometimes talking about how crazy things got with the currencies.

The only thing I can really think of here is that the price of CSC (if you're buying it with sP) seems to keep slowly going up, but it's still not too bad.