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Disclaimer: I'm really not familiar with AOS.

I found my abandoned and half-finished Empire army as well as my starter set Stormcasts and I thought I might finally do something with the models and use them to play AOS. Trying to catch up with all the rules revealed that while the game now thankfully now has a point system, it is unit based and the units point cost does not vary depending on its equipment. Many units, characters in particular just seem to have a lot of options which are purely beneficial and it would be dumb not to take from competitive perspective. For example Freeguild General can have a horse and a banner. So if I, for aesthetic reasons, do not equip him with those, I'm just gimping myself, right? Similarly Lord-Celestant on Dracoth can have that super shield (which annoyingly is not supplied with the starter set Celestant) and Freeguild Guard too can choose to have shields with no apparent drawback. There's a lot of stuff like this. Now I'm not a terribly competitive person, this is primarily a modelling hobby for me, but it still seems to silly to pass such significant game benefits just for aesthetic reasons.

Am I missing something? Am I approaching this whole thing all wrong?

You have it right, unfortunately not picking the best option is indeed gimping yourself. If you find this still bothering you after having a few games under your belt it may be worth seeing if your friends will let you use PPC (link in my sig) since that portions things out and works fine playing against normal GHB lists. But I would still use the GHB starting off since it is largely the baseline for AoS and in a casual setting things are more or less balanced.

From a technical perspective, you are just worse off for not having modeled those adavantages, but I have found that from a practical perspective it will probably end up making more of a difference if you got two turns in a row or your opponent had a terrible to-wound roll, than if your freeguild had a shield or not. I play dwarfs and technically should have modeled all the warriors with shields and great weapons, but i didnt like the idea of that, so all mine either have shields or great weapons and in most games I think that other rolls make much more of a difference than my load-out.

Keep in mind when equipping models that they can't necessarily take anything they want. The first section of a unit's warscroll describes how it can be armed. The Free Guild General, for example, has the following options:

Great Weapon
Sigmarite Weapon and Shield (Shield may be traded for a pistol)
Banner
Warhorse
If a Warhorse is taken, the General may take a Lance in place of the Sigmarite Weapon.

 EnTyme wrote:
Keep in mind when equipping models that they can't necessarily take anything they want. The first section of a unit's warscroll describes how it can be armed. The Free Guild General, for example, has the following options:

Great Weapon
Sigmarite Weapon and Shield (Shield may be traded for a pistol)
Banner
Warhorse
If a Warhorse is taken, the General may take a Lance in place of the Sigmarite Weapon.

Right. But you can have weapon(s) + banner + pony. There is no mechanical reason for not always taking the latter two.