In theory. In practice, published PGP encryption subkeys has only seen adoption in emails.
Besides, is the criticism that people are using published keys for email? It seems people are outraged that they received encrypted data using keys that they themselves advertised. The specific medium for data transfer doesn’t seem to matter here.
Great, but while the encryption vs signing choice is presented by common software (albeit in a way that does not make this consequence clear), it completely does not present the encrypt for communication and encrypt for storage options.
Perhaps another flag for automatic vs non automatic would help.