"Our game made €4 million," says Rise of Industry's creator. "Three years later, I was broke"
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
I feel like there's a difference between cosmetic microtransactions, game-balance altering ones, and the predatory ones most gamers including me dislike. The ones where you only have 10 energy for actions and every action depletes your energy, so you wait 10 hours or PAY 10 IN GEMS, DON'T HAVE ENOUGH GEMS? BUY 55 FOR $2.99! Which are acquired quickly as you learn the game and then you get a very slow dripfeed of them once you have completed all tutorial/onboarding tasks, and which you are forced to spend in the tutorial. Or the lootbox gambling ones. I'm all for cosmetics to support the dev, but take a dim view of the game-balance altering ones and outright predatory ones.
Although I do wonder how much whatever-dollar-horse-armor opened the floodgates to this.