Accurate. The licensing (and the "kill switch") at a previous job were controlled entirely via Salesforce. Our app would "phone home" regularly to check which features are being paid for and we'd toggle them on and off in our app accordingly.

I had, at the same company, been asked to evaluate building Salesforce apps (using the custom programming language they provide) and contrasting that with building new apps on our own metadata-driven platform.

Developers hate it, business people love it. It won't be going away for lack of paying customers, that's for sure.