And your last line: "...even EV owners are better off if there's less govt "help" and we let the free market do its thing..." shows you see the better pathway.
Kudos to you, FRiend...
What does it mean to the EV charging experience? You get what you pay for. Slow or nonworking chargers. Often no place to use the restroom while it charges. Lines of everybody else wanting the "free" charge.
But if you go to a charger you have to pay for, it's completely different. Last year I drove home from Canada (1,740 miles one way) and all but 2 of my charging stops were done in 10-15 minutes while I used the restroom. Clean restrooms and good food and drinks because you're paying for it -- they want you to have a good charging experience and stop again the next time you drive that way (and post on EV forum apps like Plugshare what your charge speed and experience was like).
One of those longer charging stops was because I let it charge more than usual (it slows way down after reaching 85% and going all the way to 100%) because I wanted to be out of the car for a while and walked across the street to get a bite to eat. So excluding the charging stop that I made take a while, the only charging stop that took longer than I wanted (it wound up being 25 minutes) was the one in Canada on a remote highway with few options (an early adopter at a restaurant and gas station with probably no ability to run a higher amperage power line out to that area).
End result? 32.5 hours of driving/charging/eating time to go 1,740 miles (not counting a 10 hour hotel stay and a half our of stopping to do work on my laptop). Which is about what time it'd take me to do the trip in a gas car. But only because I respected the free market to give me the better driving experience. (And because I researched ahead of time that the trip had plenty of fast chargers along the way, otherwise I would have taken my older gas pickup, same for if I had made the trip up north during the winter.) If I had expected a govt funded trip it would have taken a lot longer.