Remote access is the single area where Plex is better.

Saying things like this is laughable. JellyFin is basically temu plex, better at pretty much nothing other than being open source. At best it matches it in some ways, at worst it is significantly worse and lacking features.

Everything about Jellyfin is free. This includes hardware transcoding, which is subscription based on Plex.

If the server owner has a lifetime pass, theres no subscription fee needed by anyone. Hardware transcoding on Plex is also significantly better than on JellyFin.

The Jellyfin apps are also much better than they used to be.

But still trash compared to plex.

To me, it seems like a really hard sell when Jellyfin effectively does everything that the paid service does for free.

Again, apart from easy and secure remote streaming.