That's what I've heard as well. Also, the lag to when you actually get paid is super painful.

Also curious - how do you think about affiliates as someone who runs an ecommerce site? Are there any reservations about whether services like us take search traffic or ads revenue?

Is the implication here that you need to charge and users will leave you once you do? If you can make a product that's significantly better, then you should be able to charge. The thing I'd note for affiliate marketing as a business model is that for it to generate significant revenue, you need to have a lot of traffic while other business models can generate that much faster (subscriptions) or make you money based off of that traffic (ads) instead of how many products are purchased.