On the other side of the coin the ESEA platform is actually technically and functionally very sound, great servers & the community are a gazillion times better than of MM.
The actual thing works, yes.
From my very limited experiance months ago, no the community is not better than MM, at all. Just like everything, you find griefers/children etc. in all services. The % of toxic players is very comparable to what you find in MM too (at the higher levels).
Skill level I found is lower on ESEA. I played 4 games and went +ve on each. My team was dreadful in each game. Back then, I was DMG-LE. The idea that all ESEA games are of high level is also false.
Balance in games is the most important thing. In MM, I nearly always get a balanced game (by that I mean both teams get 8 rounds or more). FACEIT is terrible for this. All games I get are an easy win for one side. ESEA is better, but it will still give you quite a number of unbalanced games (which is very understandable).
128 tick is a non issue for me. I play a few community 128 tick servers and FACEIT, and I play identical to what I do on 64 tick servers. It's a placebo. And even if you feel that your shots are not registering on 64 tick, there are a lot of times where you got the better of the 64 tick servers and your opponents shots didn't hit.
And even if you think that the ESEA community is better, and that games are more balanced, and that the skill level is higher, and that the ESEA servers are superior, you are still installing what is the definition of malware on your PC. I won't get started on the BitCoin thing, but this version of the client installs a driver which has access to all of your data, keeps running when you force it to stop and can never be uninstalled completely (i.e. uninstall client does not remove all of the stuff, and I'm not talking about meaningless registry fragments either). The attitude of LPKane (or whatever his name is) is very bad too. You'll get instantly banned from the service (although they generally refund your last month for you) at the first sign of disagreement. They also acted very immaturely on the Brosser downs video thing. If i was a pro player ad I was forced to play ESEA tournaments I would simple install a VM and play it off there. NO WAY would the esea client be on my PC in any way. But I'm not your dad, you are free to do whatever you want.
I think faceit is grossly under rated. I always play it with friends so I can't really comment on the community. The servers are typically ok, although sometimes I tend to get high pings to close servers (150 to France, when my connection is stable) but this is not a regular thing. There is a reason EU pros are nearly exclusively playing FACEIT now (Taz, Nip, Dignitas etc. were using the new Pro league a few days ago, and NiP have been doing Faceit for ages). The only thing FACEIT needs to be really good is a better matchmaking thing. Their rank doesn't work well and as I said, games are generally not balanced and thus, not fun.
I just stick to MM. Servers are good enough. Cheaters are not a huge issue generally and a game is found very quickly and it is generally quite balanced.
EDIT: What am I supposed to be seeing in that FACEIT video? The guy taking long to appear isn't down to the server performance but due to a plugin used by FACEIT to prevent wallhacking and a number of other hacks. The delay is generally caused also by bad internet connection on your end. I was playing faceit 2/3 days ago and it started ok. Once I had a relatively high ping people were taking ages to turn round the corner. I believe that plug in also comes with ESEA and Valve MM servers. There were a bunch of posts complaining about the same thing on reddit a few weeks/months ago.