Yes, and you have to build everything yourself, or you have to sign up to testflights.

You can develop apps without paying the fee, but you'll need to pay if you want to actually publish. That's been a great move IMO, because it's a gateway to stop spammy apps from appearing on the store. If you put in $99 and have to go through a review process, you'll put the extra effort into making a good app.

Well you also need to have a mac. And mac minis have 8gb of ram that makes them practically useless for serious work. So you need a >1000$ system.