The way most of the relays are doing it you are right. If you just have few paid relays you will only see what others on that relay post and they will only see what you post so is far from ideal.

What you will start see is relays providing other services like aggregating content from many relays and posting your content to many relays also.

Nostr.wine is already doing this and how they aggregating data into your feed is very clever.