Would my location pages be hurting my site’s ranking?

I'm the sole marketing/IT/dev guy for a small service business, and I run a web dev side business, so I built our company site myself.

In my role I talk to a lot of ad sales reps. One from Hibu mentioned something I hadn't considered: location pages. Not just a service-area page listing the cities/towns you serve, but a dedicated landing page for each one, so when someone searches "Best ABC in XYZ City," you've got a page targeting that city specifically.

The kicker: Hibu charges $40 per location page per month. Ten cities would run $400/month. That struck me as absurd since I could build these for free. So I did. Our site now has 113 cities on the service-area page, each with its own landing page, plus a page for each of our 4 services in each city, 565 unique location pages total, all programmatically generated with a static site builder.

Yesterday, another pair of reps with another marketing firm were pitching me. They started their pitch by listing things we were doing right and mentioned the location pages, but one said, "So long as they're not all the same." I admitted they are the same, city name aside. He responded that in that case they're probably not ranking or helping at all, and I'd need to make each page genuinely unique beyond just the city name.

Is this true? Can location pages actually hurt your rankings if they aren't unique enough from each other?