> but I haven’t actually seen any stripped functionality

Plugins, the watch later list, the up next/playback queue, Plex Cloud/Cloud Sync, photo backup (this one hurt), privacy preferences were badly nerfed.

Those are just the ones I miss, I'm sure there are more (like the short lived arcade thing).

Watch Together is also being removed

Which got a lot of people (including me, also a lifetime subscriber) in this thread absolutely livid: https://forums.plex.tv/t/allow-watch-together-for-tv-shows-m...

(We were begging for them to fix the functionality of watch together for almost 5 years)

For lifetime pass owners, I think you've dodged the features they've put paywalls up for. The big one is preventing free accounts from streaming to shared user libraries. So if you have your pass + 5 buddies sharing their plexes (and they don't have Plus), you cannot view their content I believe.

You first post said "built a loyal following around a set of features provided, no questions asked, to stream your content to your own devices" and now you're saying they removed the ability for people to share content with each other if they are not paying customers.