What is the state of NovelAI compared to competitors?

Hello, I am new to AI and writing.

One of the things drawing me to supporting NovelAI right now is it's focus on supporting privacy and creative freedom, although I haven't made the plunge yet as I am weighing my options. I wanted to list some negatives I heard about NovelAI and ask if the community can address them for me, what's true and what's not or what needs better clarification:

1. I have heard multiple times that NovelAI uses "ancient" AI from the ChatGPT-2 days (I understand NovelAI has never used ChatGPT, simply stating a timeframe) Is that true? Is NovelAI using a less sophisticated and older LLM?
2. I have heard that NovelAI spent a lot of time with it's text-to-image generation and that had allowed it to fall behind it's competitors in terms of text generation for the purposes of writing, is that true? Is NovelAI "behind" other competitors in terms of a writing/storytelling tool?
3. If anyone has used "Novelcrafter" or "Sudowrite", how do those compare to NovelAI?

Thank you, I'm just trying to get a better picture of the AI-writing landscape.

EDIT: I, myself, don't have much interest in creating NSFW content, but I respect the idea of creative freedom; that said, again, my main focus is not NSFW content and I'm unsure if NovelAI is right for me even as someone who'd be writing SFW fiction-work.