That’s the way I feel about all insurance, home, car, health. Sometimes I wonder if I would have come out ahead by just saving my money and “self insuring”.
By definition, that's how self insurance is supposed to work. Look at all the possibilities of claims that can happen to you, and let's call that total $X. Most people can't afford $X, especially since we're talking unplanned/unforeseen catastrophes. That's why self insurance is out of the question, and sometimes not even an option considering that mortgagees and lienholders require insurance in most cases.
So the insurance company figures out what $X is for you, then adds additional money to pay employees, keep the lights on, service the claims, pay executives, etc. They then break that up into monthly/yearly payments so that at scale, you end up with some people with no claims for decades, a few with some claims, and some with more (who usually end up being dropped). But, there's enough money going around to take care of the occasional hurricane or windstorm or whatever, along with the usual small claims. So yeah after all that, "on average" you'll come out ahead by self insuring, because you don't have to calculate the overhead of running an insurance company.
But look at it another way, let's say you pay $3k a year for home insurance, for a $500k home. And that home burns down to the ground. And your home insurance covers $500k to rebuild, plus $250k for belongings and other parts of the claim like covering your temporary housing. Lets say in this fire example, it burned down 3 years into you owning it. You've paid $9k to the insurance company, yet just got paid $750k for your major claim. It would take 250 years for the insurance company to "break even" if we're just looking at this one customer. But since that's not how insurance works, your premiums are pooled with everyone else's hence the reason they're able to charge you only $3k per year vs $75k a year or something impractical. Most people are willing to pay the guaranteed loss (the premiums to the insurance company) to avoid the unknown loss $X described above.
If the insurance company determines there's no reliable way to increase your rates in order to maintain that balance, they'll drop you. Sucks, but Florida property insurance is struggling for many reasons, and I don't envy anyone dealing with property insurance issues in that state right now.