But it's not about all the choices, logins, subscriptions or anything like that. It's about the game play alone. It's smooth and fast while you play. The servers don't lag, don't crash, the UI is very responsive, you don't feel like overall slowness and lag of all of it robs you of time or experience.

You can debate all other surrounding stuff being influenced by the author's politics but this one is purely about him being able to implement it and the commercials competitors failing spectacularly.

It's not unique to Lichess btw, back in the day ICC had smooth, responsive gameplay as well. It was commercial and it was great.