Honestly, fair criticism, as it is still a $60 game and in my old timer’s brain that means everything should be unlockable through gameplay. Unfortunately, that’s just not how the market seems to work anymore, so I’ll just be glad their extra monetization is only limited to cosmetics and not gameplay stuff as well.
NYT and WaPo both have articles about it. Paywalled, so I can see why OP wouldn’t link em. I can’t even get the wsj home page to load on firefox with ublock, so I can’t say whether they reported on it at all, but it’s not exactly like nobody is reporting on this.