I always went with the formula of three actions per individual, no sugar coating that fourth action and saying it is only counted towards that summon's/clone's action limit. The way that I see it. Clones and summons were never exempt in anyway and I always counted them towards the action limit.
Passive abilities is another matter entirely. Since a lot of us have passive abilities active at either at the start of the battle or right when it starts, however I don't know how everyone feels about counting the continuous activation of *any* passive ability towards the action limit. Thought that I brought this up now, before it becomes an issue in the future.
In my eyes, a passive ability is something you can't turn on or off, thus have no real control over it. It's just something that's happening, whether by design or some other thing. Like when we have a Dojutsu active. Do we count that towards the overall action limit? No, because it falls into that activation and rendered passive category. Now, if you do something with it, Amaterasu or Genjutsu, that goes into manipulation and costs an action.
That's only obvious. Otherwise we'd have to count breathing as an action. Seeing with our eyes as an action. Hearing. Feeling. Smelling. Sensing, in general, as individual actions. We don't, because they're passive.
I'm gonna use Dart's Earth Spear as an example. I treat that as passive, how it is right now. Because, he hasn't had a reason to fiddle with it. It hasn't been harmed, not counting losing an arm, but I mean he hasn't had a reason to repair any damage to it. And obviously he's trained it to such a degree that's he's able to hold it for pretty much as long as he pleases. So, he has the expertise to not need a lot of chakra to sustain the technique.
Just like with you and your sensing barrier. Once it's up, you don't fiddle with it and thus it's passive. You're trained up, so you don't have to worry about wasting chakra with it.
Tau, with his bone armor, I'm sure he's got some super hard bones layered under his skin. He doesn't need to constantly put chakra into it, because he's already mastered it.
Athos, with being an asshole. That's passive, I mean, it's there, pretty much nothing we can do about that. Lmao, but seriously, that way of the fist, it's there because he's trained himself to have it just be an all the time sort of thing.
We can all focus on those passive abilities to remind the others and ourselves, that they're a thing, but that shouldn't count as an action. With this being a word based thing, we need to remind people of what's happening with the best of our abilities.