All ham radio repeater groups here dropped Meshtastic as it was super unreliable. And they know how to build proper antennas and filters.

Meshcore is 100% free. The last issue was the closed sorce Android/iPhone client - but there are FOSS Flutter based-Opensource clients available (https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open)

I ran some Meshtastic nodes for a while, same overall experience.

Rarely saw nearby nodes, never communicated anything more than a basic "HELLO"/"ACK" kind of thing.

It's a neat idea for things like a distributed sensor network on your own property, or other IoT kinds of comms. It's not a practical platform for human to human comms, especially in a disaster scenario.

Meshtastic simultaneously has too few nodes for most people to see many reliably, and has a scaling problem where too many nodes where saturate the network.