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.
This is the same story with Salesforce. I am building a new age quoting solution (CPQ) at my latest startup and talk to businesses of various stages regularly. Our biggest "competitor" out there right now is Salesforce CPQ. There is not one person that I have met so far who has not said that onboarding, configuring and then successfully using Salesforce CPQ is a painful process. What SF CPQ does in weeks, sometimes months, we (and our contemporaries) are able to accomplish in hours. And yet the huge entry barrier exists for startups like us is because SFDC has got the CRM market completely covered. Just because they are able to do CRM well, they are then able to build a walled garden around it.