I think, at this point, this is known - but it's limited to certain segments of the audience. A lot of gamers have happily dropped hundreds of dollars on Paradox titles (keeping up with the DLCs) without ever feeling that gut wrenching guilt you get from interacting with freemium systems - even while outspending the average user by a large margin.
Freemium games have several really big flaws that have come to prominence lately - one of the biggest comes into play with competitive games. If the game has no acquisition cost then bans are really hard to enforce so cheating can be extremely common.
That's assuming anyone is even doing anything about them cheating in the first place. Most publishers seem to only react when streamers draw attention to someone cheating.
I saw a COD: warzone youtube video where the streamer got someone banned by messaging an activision employee; the player was riding around on an ATV, instantly shooting every player. They get bounced mid-game.
It's a "fuck yaeaaaa, activision!" moment...until the streamer goes and looks at their game stats and sees that they had a lifetime K/D ratio of something like 20, where TWO is practically world-class...and that they'd played dozens of games. The streamer asks: why weren't they bounced (or at least subject to account review) simply by having wildly off-the-chart stats alone?
Because Activision doesn't care. Cheaters don't really impact their bottom line.
It's actually the opposite - they don't chase the users, they chase, pin, and throw the developers of these mods in jail.
It is just by the time they do that, the mods tools/anti-cheat is leaked and prevalent to even free users.