It does match your experience, you just explained their justification. There is no reason to require a central account. Linking discovery, etc is completely possible without it.
Even if they did have the account, the unforgivable part is that you cannot use the mobile app for your family and have people have different profiles because the plex pass is tied to a profile. That’s a sleazy cash grab that drove me off of plex.
Unless they changed it, having Plex Pass on the account that manages the server “blesses” that server, unlocking all Plex Pass features for everyone using that particular server.
They have changed it.
An example of this is sunsetting Plex Sync and replacing it with Plex Downloads.
At the time they used the whole 'Sync never worked right' argument to justify why they got rid of it. In reality, Plex sync used to allow any user to download videos from any server where the server owner had plex pass.
Now with downlods, the user must have Plex Pass to download anything.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/downloads-sync-faq/
There are other examples where they have done this as well.