That sentence talks about the subscription tier of the service and it's limitations, not about the client app.

I used the N9 for more than eight years as my "main" phone for calls / chat / simple web browsing even though in the end I also had a secondary android phone for work / stuff that wasn't possible to do on the N9 anymore...

It was just the best phone I ever had with some features that even now are hard to come by: just pick it up and see the clock on the AMOLED display coming on without having to press anything. Put it down "face-down" for the night to mute it completely. While I did have to replace the screen couple of times, I actually chipped more tiles with it when I dropped it (although Xperia XZ1 Compact is better at that with it's metal edges ;). Compared to the android phones of that time, the wifi power management really worked, so that I didn't have to turn wifi off as I did have to with android phones... And the UI was really good (and I liked that it was really "plain" although I guess it wouldn't be that hard to theme it into impossible things if it got traction).

People kept asking me why I use an old Lumia phone with reportably unusable windows mobile... and in time I just stopped explaining how Microsoft ruined what could have been a great line of phones...