Any company that has a product built on recurring payments will always tend towards becoming predatory in the money they need to extract because #1 they need to have pinch points to ensure they get money at regular, predictable intervals since they're a business and #2 because there is absolutely no reason for them not to turn the dial up on the micro-transactions -- up and up -- slowly until the profit gained is cancelled out by the quitting players.
Lol what a shitty take. I haven't spent a dime on it and I've had plenty of fun with it. I have like 10 characters and I can only use 4 anyway (8 sometimes later on) so it's not like I need more. There isn't even pvp so what does it even mean to say that it's "pay-to-win?"
Also all this "cultural" shit is BS. Why don't we compare Genshin to like Hearthstone, which is actually pay-to-win, and very frustrating if you don't spend money on it? The consequence of not spending money and playing Hearthstone is constantly losing to stupidly powerful rare cards, no matter how you build your deck or play the game (ime, maybe I just suck idk), whereas the only consequence of not spending money on Genshin is that you have fewer waifus to choose from. That's it.
I'm sorry that you're upset over streamers spending money on it to get views, I guess??
Yeah, as a former legend/somewhat competitive f2p player, it's either spend money or spend time grinding arena/dailies for gold/dust (what I did) to be able to build all the meta decks and useful tech cards. Although to be fair, if you're just going for a decently high rank and not aiming to compete in tournaments, you really only need one top tier meta deck but even then that could require a hefty amount of resources to craft.