I'm so glad that I looked up some cheat codes for Turok 64 back in the day. It had two powerful weapons that were meant to be used sparingly after finding a rare inatance, in one case, or searching the entire game for pieces, after which you only got 3 shots with it. I used those two weapons until I got bored of them.

Then I tried to play the game again without the cheats and realized it was ruined for me. Why would I care to spend time searching for each piece of that weapon, knowing it only has 3 shots, when I was already bored with it?

And then later on, after I had been raiding in WoW, very focused on getting my loot upgrades, I noticed the loop of raiding to get better gear to get better at raiding to get better gear and realized it only had a point if I enjoyed the raiding, otherwise the gear didn't matter, regardless of what stats or graphics it had.

Those two things together have made it easy to never spend any money on game progression. It's basically spending money to either get bored of the game quicker by trivializing the powerful things (monetized cheat codes or powerups), or to avoid playing the game in the first place (getting the gear without the raid, when the whole point of the gear is to help with the raid).

And yeah, often the game isn't worth going through the loop, but they design the early stages to give fast progression to build up an expectation but tune it so that it's a slog grind if you don't buy anything, hoping for a few bucks from people as they learn this, or a lot of bucks from those who set strong habits and never do learn.

And when progression is pinned to an exponential curve while upgrades are non-exponential but tuned to be ahead of the curve when you first get them, it doesn't matter how much money you spend, eventually you'll always be back at a curve that looks more vertical than anything else and you'll need to spend money or wait a crazy amount of time.