Just look at this week's games, I challenge that digital games are generally equal or cheaper.
We have watch dogs and Assasins creed already on sale, and tons of good older games on for $10-20. They all drop fast on the digital store. If you were to own one and be silly enough not to get gamepass, you have no issues.
Ubisoft games always get a discount very fast, they are not really indicative, and no offense but even 10-15 dollars discount is still less that what you get by reselling a phsical game when you are done with it after a week or a month, so yeah once again, physical is cheaper (if you sell your old games of course)
try to find demons or spiderman or any other big sony exclusive in discount on digital store at day one or even a couple of weeks\a month later, i challenge you.
On the other hand you have shops that make advantagious offers when you preorder from them, for example here in italy i didn't payed a game at day one more than 50 euros (instead of 70) since ps3 era because euronics (techy brand here in italy\europe) does this thing where you get a discount of 20 euros or a 20 euros psn card to spend when you preorder a game. (the fuckers decided to not do this the first year of life for the new consoles but they already confirmed me that from next year everything is gonna return like always)
and even if that didn't existed, you still have gamestop where you pay half the price if you have a recent game to get back to them, an offer only possible thanks to physical copies and people who buy them.
explain to me how digital is better in these cases? and if these stuff exist in europe, you can be sure that a lot of techy shops all around the world do the exact same, literally the only advantages of going digital is for lazy people to not move from home...
I used gamepass in the past, for me it's like a gigantic demo library, if i have a couple of games that i'm not convinced of, i try them on gamepass before the purchase, it was pretty useful when it was 1 euro for month on pc, i didn't used recently so i don't know how pricey is right now.
but like i said, it's pretty useless if you already bought the game you were interested at launch, it's not like everyone is gonna be interested in every game on their catalogue, when i activated gamepass the first time i only had like 1-2 games that were kinda interesting because the rest was already been played, this happen when you are an enthusiast gamer that mostly buy at day one without waiting for plus or gamepass to play games...
Of course they also add new games every month so the service is still gold for a lot of people, i have nothing against gamepass, it's a great value for certain type of gamers.