Webhooks are absolutely the right tool for async / background jobs, or events driven domains. I’m not sure payments, and its flip side of entitlements, is best modeled as an events-driven domains.

In a perfect world money would trade hands and you’d just see what that meant for the features or value your customers could access accordingly. This is what happens in other domains of online commerce like Shopify. Shopify has webhooks but they are not the primary load bearing site of payment integration for most storefronts.

Payments webhooks were, from what I can tell in the history, a hack for side stepping gnarly problems in domain modeling and read optimization.