Reminds me a lot of the now infamous reddit EA comment: "The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes. As for cost,..."
Perhaps I'm voluntarily jumping in front a bus here, but I'm not sure there's anything inherently wrong with requiring players to play for a certain number of hours to unlock multiplayer features. Call of Duty has been doing this since 2007, and is the most popular multiplayer game on the planet.
A certain number of hours for some features is reasonable. But if I recall correctly, the controversy was that you had to play for 40 hours in order to unlock just one of these characters.
The community got mad when they tried to say this was to cultivate "a sense of accomplishment" when the goal was really to encourage players to buy lootboxes in order to skip the grind.
