That's not the clunky part of it. With something like that vacation mode where a dev could theoretically stop the billing pause at any point it would be kind of weird if the subscribers wouldn't need to confirm to be charged again. No idea how it works on Patreon, but I would be kind of surprised if it where much different.
The clunky part of it is that people that haven't been charged for over a year still get displayed as subscribers with no way for me to remove them. And that's not only the case for the numbers you can see but also my analytics or the projected amount of the payout page.