Sure this is a very nice cause, but if you don't have proper revenue, you can't pay UX designers to make something more people could use. Explains why Lichess is straight up ugly and the interface is just messy.
Just because damn-near every other website on the internet is comprised entirely of gradients and parallax scrolling doesn't mean any that doesn't is "ugly".
Newspaper websites are full of advertisement and probably the worst sites in terms of UX in the internet. Even if you hide the ads, there's still the constant clickbait and autoplaying videos. Same for paid-by-ad blogs that just use default themes (with notable exceptions like Daring Fireball). Same for any file hosts that doesn't have a freemium model (compare, for example, Mediafire vs Dropbox).
On the other hand, services that offer recurring signatures mostly often have better UX.