I’m glad I learned this lesson back in the N64 days when I used cheat codes on Turok to get all the guns and infinite ammo. It was fun for a little while but ended up ruining the game for me. There was one weapon that had a piece hidden in each level and then you only get three shots with it. With the cheats, I just went around spamming it until bored, but then I found I wasn’t really motivated to play the game properly. Going out and finding the stuff was as much the game as using it.
So when MTX came along, I remember thinking “holy shit, that’s going to make money” after seeing Blizzard failing to stop people from giving money to gold farmers even though they’d sometimes remove items or ban accounts they’d catch doing it. But I also never had much temptation to buy them myself because I knew that I would just be spending money to get bored of the game quicker after a brief time of feeling like I was awesome (which would also be false because putting money into a machine isn’t awesome).