Hmm, sounds like a rough start out of the gate for the CX - I'd even go as far as to say it actually seems like a downgrade from the 2019 C9.
The floating black thing would be most annoying but given LG's history I'd be confident in a firmware fix - eventually.
I think the biggest negative sounds like the lack of Freeview Play, this would bother me on LG more than on any other display, simply because they have a superb smart platform when compared to all others. I'm not sure the implications of the lesser 40Gbps ports compared to last year.
I think the lack of Freeview Play does harm the 2020 models given one of LG's key strengths is their WebOS, so a large part of the appeal is relying on their Smart TV platform and skipping an external box entirely.
Either way, if I were in the market for a new OLED currently I think these two omissions from the CX would actually drive me towards the C9, and that's even if they were the same price. Obviously price is a factor and this just makes the C9's value proposition much, much more appealing.
I know there's a lot of buzz about Filmmaker mode this year, which the C9 is lacking, but if I understand this correctly it's just an accurate preset with all the processing turned off by default. So you could pick the most accurate preset on the C9, and have the one time inconvenience of turning the processing stuff off, and you have the same result anyway? Or maybe there's more to it than that...