Unfortunately yes. The fact that you cannot do anything without a partner is truly mind boggling. From what I have learned so far, you end up paying anywhere between 1x-3x of the licence cost to the partner just to get it implemented and make small changes here and there. It's crazy how high the TCO of this software is in this day and age.
One of my current clients was trying to onboard one of their industry specific solutions that was only available through a channel/partner engagement. Decided to add SFMC into the mix but it was out of scope for the partner so she sent me the documentation. A 400 page PDF of absolute garbage which was impossible to implement because it was filled with references to missing information, deprecated or removed features, and bizarre directives to do things that weren’t even sensible or possible. Ended up scrapping the entire project after four months and six digits in billables to Salesforce and the partner with nothing to show for it.