Yes. But it used to be free to watch remotely. It’s 99% your own hardware doing everything. Their services get used for discovery, not as proxies for the connection itself, AFAIK.
You already had to pay them to allow transcoding with your own GPU, etc.
Right now it’s still not too bad, but just watch, enshittification will affect paid users too. For one, I expect the lifetime pass to go away, and go away retroactively eventually.
Looks like someone left their debug code in.
this is also a setting on both Android and iOS, with Android displaying the option to change access pretty much every time you pick out a file.
For photos at the very least, it’s the same on iOS. Haven’t tested with files. But anytime I needed to send people photos over FB Messenger, I’d add access to that one specific photo and nothing more. Until I got tired of it and added all photos. Oh well.
You’d need an operating system that uses it. It’s going to be at least as difficult as flashing a custom rom, but likely even more so, as there might not be a ready-made build. Definitely something to experiment with on a secondary phone. PostmarketOS is your best bet, here are others that support Plasma Mobile.