AFK Arena

Yes there's a variety of timers to procure resources over time. Sometimes you need that to proceed.

PvP is largely pay to play at the top.

Yes you'll miss an event which won't usually have too much impact but you can. You easily miss very time limited codes for minimal or sometimes additional content. And there's always the chance of missing out on the balloon ride that appears every week or so. There's additionally the risk of losing the meta.

There's plenty of bundles and sometimes a cheap reward at the top after a free reward..

There are skins that are rewards during events rather than using the event currency to get rewards to help upgrade. You will need to upgrade a hero far enough with copies of itself and fodder hero copies to get it to Red which allows it's emblem to upgrade. Then you'll need red to go from red plus and then white to access it's furniture then you need an extra star which requires two copies of itself for most heroes so you can upgrade it's rank. These all add new powers.

Not too many but some which reward diamonds or nothing if you get enough. Plus pvp rewards.

As more heroes release you will inevitably have less impact from stargazer cards. Even getting one hero still needs levels.

You can use diamonds or stargazer cards or ascension cards for random rewards with low percent chances of good ones and you can buy these diamonds with currency.

There's an optional subscription option of three sorts now and each new event has a reward bracket you can pay to gain good rewards for each free level you progress through during the event. These are also no longer invisible to f2p players.

In the sense that you can pause battles but you can not save progress until a battle is complete. Higher battles require multiple wins. There are also some events with other players.