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.
I'm really eager to get to the point where we can work on CRM extensibility and developer experience. We're hoping to bring traditional web development workflows and not re-invent anything.
We opted for a multi-tenant infrastructure for the cloud hosted version so there will be some additional challenges to make it work in that context!
If you wanna see what that might look like, take a look at servicenow, I do basically all my coding in vscode, and ctrl+s saves to the dev server. they have one of the more robust developer environments I've used.
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.