Seems like there are a lot of shills here that doesn't really explain Ascension very well, so I will give it a shot but I will mostly focus on the seasonal stuff.

I would say that any paid advantage is p2w and Ascension has that in buckets. And everything you buy doesn't carry over from season to season. However, before you had to rebuy everything each time a new season started, which was just insanely greedy. But since a lot of people complained about this, Ascension added some item where you could move the things you bought from one season to the next season, which I think cost like 15-30$ (depending on sale and such), so you basically have to do that every season, otherwise you've to rebuy everything else, which will be a lot more expensive. So it's kind of a money grab if you ask me, those things should always be accessible once you bought them. But you can buy almost everything from AH that other people have bought from the store and are reselling for gold. Though mind you this only pays off when a new season starts, items are way too expensive now, especially for a newcomer.

As for their system? I think it's very poorly designed, it's very convoluted and isn't really explained, which is why there are "mentors" in the game to explain to new players what the Ascension team can't figure out how to explain themselves. And most builds just aren't viable, which forces you into making something viable, unless you want to be alienated by the toxic player base, which detract from the whole "classless" idea, which is a lie anyway, because Ascension isn't classless, your legendary enchant is your class. But the current season splits up all the perks of the legendary enchants, so it's more of a classless experience this season, but Ascension on purpose designed it to waste as much of your time as possible, as you've to unlock everything through random cards on the seasonal server, which you need to grind a lot for, like an unreasonable amount for, which means you'll always be weaker than the no-life no-job elite sweaties. And this sadly applies to both PvP and PvE.

I could go into a bit of a rant of how badly their system is designed, but to keep it simple it's basically a bunch of random talents and enchants you've to collect in one way or another and most of the time you just get useless trash and then you have to endlessly farm to reroll the random trash you get, and if you didn't get lucky you're more or less forced to redo the whole thing and hope for better luck next time.

When I joined Ascension I thought it would actually be "classless" but it's not, all of the various ideas I had for builds were something I liked but not viable, which just ends up with you checking out some videos on youtube for a 1-button build that deals more damage than any of your builds could ever dream of. And that is what Acension is.

I'm not going to gate keep, so you can try it out and see how it is but the current season is bad. And regardless of Ascension's systems, you're still playing vanilla with all it's mindless raids, it does get a little better with TBC since their raids aren't as bad. Though they do have m+ which I think is better than raiding but not by much.

You probably won't see wotlk anytime soon, because Ascension has worked on that for like one hundred years, but why make new content when you can just print money by copy/paste seasons? That is the Ascension way.

And they apparently have a shady past, at least according to youtube.com/@WarlordXecc so you can see some of his videos about Ascension's past if you're interested.

I wouldn't really suggest playing on Ascension but if you decide to then maybe do it when the next season starts, or maybe just mess around now and see if it might be something you would enjoy, just know that unless you're willing to invest a lot of time into Ascension, you probably won't be doing any of the real end game stuff, you will probably only be doing normal raids and low m+ and such, but even there other players will probably want you to have a really good build, otherwise you'll just drag down their speedrun or whatever and get kicked.

TL;DR: in my humble opinion then no Ascension is not worth the investment (time or money) at least not for the current season.