Yes but in swtor you can also buy or get gifted with cartel exclusive items and unlocks. Sure, cash limit hurts a lot (actually dont know how it is right now but it was painfull) but you get all the content for free. With one sub - eso still lock all dlc if you dont sub. Dunno how it is with expansion.Im sorry, but i HAVE to disagree with your asserion that its worse than swtor. having played swtor preferred vs ESO non subscriber - sure one month of sub unlocks acess to content, but the amount of quality of life features you lose in SWTOR if you do not subscribe is absolutely staggering. even if you spend gigantic amounts of cartel coins to unlock every possible quality of life feature like you know.. being able to use all 3 crew skills, having more skill bars, being able to hide your helmet - it still restricts you by a LOT
in ESO you lose a craft bag. in SWTOR you get restricted to how many credits you can use and you lose ability to purchase more bag space etc with in game credits anyways. ESO - full acess to trials for whatever content you own. SWTOR - NO acess to ops. ESO - you gain 10% less xp and gold than subscriber, which honestly I barely even felt, especially with no gold maximums per character. SWTOR you gain 10% OF renown xp and THAT is an improvement from you originally getting ZERO command xp back in a day. housing. ESO - buy a house (and you don't have to get one of the crown houses, there's like 40 something houses that have a gold cost and some of them are quest rewards, so you basically get them at no additional gold cost) and you are good to go, SWTOR - upgrade one wing at a time and because of credit limits, you pretty much have to use cartel coins if you are not a subscriber. furniture - bulk of ESO's furnishings are crafted/vendor/achievement based. relatively small amount is cash shop only, and almost no furnishings are locked behind RNG cash crates. SWTOR. bulk of the furnishings are cash shop only, and more then half of those are locked behind rng crates.
and so on and so forth. one of the biggest differences in cash shops is that in ESO - a lot of what is sold in a cash shop, is earnable in game. there is an overlap. you can buy it with cash, or you can buy it with in game gold and now that crown gifting is a thing, you can literally get all of the DLC's gifted to you, traded for in game gold. I am aware that you can buy most cash shop things in swtor with credits, BUT... the costs are prohibitive especially with credit limits.
in a nutshell i can continuously play ESO without subscription just fine and mostly it just means I spend a bit more time on bag management and cannot hoard as much gear. i can NOT play swtor without subscription unless I'm just leveling alts and even then, unlike ESO's overlap of cash shop OR in game means (like the newest motif for instance, you can buy it from cash shop, or you could farm vet dungeon for drops), in swtor most things kinda have to come from cash shop before they can even be sold to players. there are NO in game means to earn those things.
is ESO perfect? no. not even remotely. but is it worse that SWTOR? it takes some serious personal bias to say that with a straight face