It's very refreshing.
(I used to be bitter about chess.com, thinking they're just cashing in on their domain name and charging for features because they can. And that may be, I don't know. But I have seen them organize some good chess events, so they might not be all bad. I think they pay streamers to use their site though, a practice I'm not too happy about.)
It's all about SEO, chess.com is the first result on Google and DDG for "chess".
Lichess.org has a better UX and featureset for free than a premium chess.com subscription, but many of my friends watch steamers --> sign up to chess.com and get a worse expereince.
I much prefer chess.com's UX. They allow multiple pre-moves vs. lichess that only allows 1 premove, has much better cheat detection and overall much better handling of players who engage in bad behavior (abandoning lost games) by segregating repeat offenders into a pool of their own so they don't affect well behaved players, and lichess has a very quirky and unnecessary 300 move limit, which one can argue is more than enough for regular chess, but for speed chess is just a nuisance.
Hope you enjoy your games, and your preferences seem reasonable too!
And in terms of premoving, chess.com spends 0.1 seconds per premove whereas on lichess it's instantaneous, so I've found games tend to last longer on lichess move wise.
This is why advertising is so heavily regulated - though not even close to regulated enough.
Marketing via 'influencers' is even worse than other forms of marketing because it is one of the least regulated spaces, especially when graphed against its relative effectiveness.
That was a decade ago though. Maybe they've improved
You can pay to get an extra move or a take-back (only joking).
Actually thinking about it, there probably is a cheap chess clonelike app on mobile market that does that.
They procedurally generated 1,500+ different iterations on top of the same Unity-based slots shovelware using noun/adjective pairs. The general success they enjoyed is as sad as it is hilarious. For the record, the most enticing descriptor categories were: "3D", "Luxury", "Casino/Gambling", and "Sexy".
The main homepage is a huge mess though...
Indeed, this is how Lichess (optionally) does it (for free).
You generally have to pay to be a member of a chess club for example. For a fraction of the price, you can play with anyone in the world. Seems valuable to me.
https://www.chessstrategyonline.com/play-chess-online
Chess24 has Jan Gustafsson and Peter Svidler as commentators. Amazingly good English banter from a German and Russian. In general, the individual personalities of Nations comes through really well in chess commentary, since commentators are from all over the place, are quite sharp, and everyone is talking about the same thing in usually the same language (English). I didn’t even know Germans and Russians had a sense of humor...
ICC is an old (in Internet terms) established website.
And they have a bunch of chess variants to mix things up.
All around impressive site.