This game has some designs (that were also in the first) which are rather annoying but opinionated.
The purchasable items lessen the impact of those annoying designs.
An example is one dev saying fast travel in games is bad so they want to make travel fun, and as a result you have to backtrack through areas full of enemies a lot to get places. There are in-game beacons that are given to the player to place to allow them to fast travel, and you can only have four of them. One of the MTX is a fifth one.
It’s more impactful than just a premium currency but you can work around the annoying design choices without paying extra.
I personally find both to be disgusting and exploitative dark patterns especially in a paid single player game, but I feel that paying to work around game design decisions is a step further then is usually in these games.
From what I understand mods have already been produced which provide the items in question for free.
Have to agree that it is shady that right after Capcom went to war with mods they are introducing some kind of item scarcity! I need to play the game before commenting more because I don’t know to what extent they have made playing without these items a chore.