That last paragraph was exactly my experience with them in my medium sized town in Canada. I attended a few weeks of meetings when I first started out trying to engage in politics and not just read theory, they are the only real option in my town. They seemed like people who were pretty engaged with the ideas at first but the whole time I was being constantly pressured to become a paying member and the only things we ever really discussed in earnest were how we can “build the party” AKA get more people to join.
Party activity outside of weekly meetings was entirely putting up posters and doing recruitment speeches. They even gave me a pamphlet about how community building is dumb and cringe or something, idk I only skimmed it. In the one issue of the party newspaper they gave me the focus was half shitting on AES, especially the post Lenin USSR, and the other half was all about how many members each branch of the party has accrewed across canada. Obviously building a party base is important but like it shouldn’t be the only thing focused on. Left after about a month. Definitely felt cult-y in retrospect.
Most communist movements have red flags actually :)