I share your review 1000x. I pretty much exclusively read PDFs, mostly OCRd but sometimes not. reMarkable is the only ereader I’ve ever found usable. I do agree that the subscription model feels tacked on, but there’s good tooling otherwise (I don’t use the cloud service myself). I highly recommend it as an ereader if you want one predominantly for research, actively taking notes on your documents at home and on-the-go while wanting to sync that with your PC note apparatus.
Subscription? No way I'm buying that.
Why can't it just connect to an existing cloud storage (dropbox, Drive, iCloud). It's so ridiculous that every company wants to offer their own, highly targeted sync option.