I think you are correct.

My biggest issues with Algolia were always:

- search requests should be separated from number of documents

-- think of a geoname service where there are 10 mio. documents vs. 500k search requests -- seems to be solved now

- it is crazy to require a new index for each sort direction

-- this is still the case

imho they should introduce cpu cycles + storage. until then self hosted Typesense, Meilisearch, Elasticsearch or hosted Typesense, Elasticsearch are still superior. I am leaving out Meilisearch here as their entry level is also nuts at 1.2k/month for hosted.