I ran Gentoo for years. I run Arch now.
You're not wrong, lol.
'Course, I was running Gentoo when hardware was slow enough that you could see the real-time performance improvement from tailored compiles. Now shit's so fast that any gains are imperceptible by a human for day-to-day desktop usage. Arch can also be a bit of a time sink, I get it, especially setting it up takes time and thought. That's also why I like it, and always come back to it: I can set it up exactly how I want it, and it's really good at that. There's always weird shit that seems to happen to me when I try to remove Gnome in Ubuntu or other crazy shit that, yeah, everyone would tell you not to do, but Arch doesn't care. If I want combination of things, I can hunt for a distro that has it, or I can likely just set it up on Arch.
After setup, though, it's not any more effort to maintain than any other distro. shrug
That, and it was slightly more justifiable when these companies were first setting up and operating networks for the services and matchmaking. Economies of scale should have nullified that by now, though.
The other big one I don't see people mentioning, but that I remember clearly, was that if you wanted to use Netflix on 360, you had to pay for Live. I think that, above anything else in my friend group, was the move that normalized paying for online services on a console.