FWIW, you're not the only one. On our product, we experimented adding login when the user tries to use any of our tools and something like ~60-70% of users dropped off. So essentially, whoever implements that is killing their user funnel at the very beginning which I'm guessing will have larger effects down the road (fewer users experience "magical moments" which leads to less word-of-mouth, etc).
On the flip side though, I'm sure it may help metrics in the short term especially since it's expensive to offer a service like this (which requires expensive GPU servers).
On the flip side though, I'm sure it may help metrics in the short term especially since it's expensive to offer a service like this (which requires expensive GPU servers).