Your points are valid, but tottaly avoidable with enough dgging in the subject.
For example, I have potato PC and I'm broke, but with SillyTavern + KoboldHorde I'm able to get access to pretty good models without censore for tottaly free. Only downside I have is that good models might not always be available, but since it's free I'm fine with skipping a day or two.
About bigger amount of work you right, but result is also bigger. Instead of someone else's sick fantasies, you are exploring your own, creating stories/settings/worlds you are deeply invested in, improving your writing, language and AI prompting skills, etc. I started using LLM about a year ago and I can't write shit in English, it took me about half an hour for a single reply, but it was still worth it for me.
1) I started my journey with AIDungeon, and although I was impressed at the time, the quality of the answers is very bad. I don't know if it's better now, but back then it was on the level of a 3b model... like, a proof of concept, but not an actual product.
2) I have not personally tried NovelAI, but from other people I get the impression that even their paid model is just a heavily fine-tuned 13b lamma2 - usable, but not very good.
3) Had several memorable conversations with CharacterAI about half a year ago, it felt smart then, but now I can say that its quality was less than the quality of 70b lamma2, plus it censored AF. Can't recommend it.
In summary, in my opinion, the Horde has much better options for free than these sites offer for money. And if you are able to pay, you are better off using services that just offer open source models as the backend and use SillyTavern as the frontend. That way, all your worlds and characters will be on your PC, independent from the whims of the service provider.