iTunes won't play purchased music unless its downloaded

Over ten years of purchasing music from iTunes including as recently as 2023. Naturally my hard drive had been occupied with lots of songs so I deleted my iTunes library to clear up about 30 GBs. I backed it up to a separate hard drive as well because iTunes has been known to fumble all purchases with no chance of recovery back in like 2011.

That being said, I updated my OSX to Monterey. Prior to updating to Monterey, I was able to play my all of my purchased music from iTunes via the cloud based streaming. So although my songs weren't downloaded to my CPU, I could still browse all my music and play it as long as I was connected to the internet. However now, I can't even play the music that I paid for unless I re-download them to my CPU. The songs will show the cloud with the download arrow on them indicating that they are not currently downloaded. It's quite frustrating to say the least. Is there a reason apple decided to prevent paying consumers from enjoying already purchased music without having to download them? Why do I need to re-download music in order to listen to it? Considering I was able to play purchased music that wasn't downloaded as long as I was connected to the internet why would apple take feature that away? I might switch platforms to something more user oriented such as amazon music. Apple has really gone downhill

There's seems to be trend in taking away incentives and replacing them with subscribing features instead. I remember when steve jobs was running apple and I can't say anything negative about those times. However it seems apple is drifting away from what made them so great.