0.49 definitely does not "look better". No where close, not even objectively per individual tastes. The current paid version is definitely significantly ahead, visually, at this point. Particularly, lighting and material interaction like skin.
Stability, aside from the week or two after updates it seems mostly fine now days, especially since Helius updates so fucking slow now that there are noticeable gaps between updates. It is kind of sad his updates do regularly have issues, though, even if it is just for a few days or week/2.
One thing I've not tested is if the game runs faster when you hide other people. I remember it did not before which is fucking dumb and would solve that point you are raising about number of players. There also needs to be optimizations on the CPU side as player count has a huge impact there and that is arguably the biggest problem for now because if you have a modern CPU you are fine but if your CPU is older you're basically fucked in a full lobby compared to 0.49. That said, even with the most powerful consumer CPU and insane overclock you still can't max out a RTX 4090 or most other high end GPUs. You can get great FPS, but the fact your CPU bottlenecks so hard even on the top end CPUs only tapping like 30-40% of high end GPUs while running 4K native (no upscaling) is hilariously fucked.
Worth mention is I still see some people complain about blurry textures on the current version and for past several months, unlike 0.49 which (as far as I know) does not have that issue.