I disagree, Elite is an upfront cost same game for everyone and pay extra for cosmetics if you want them.
Free to play games tend to be Free for the base game and pay extra to advance quicker and cosmetics
Except the game being cited there in the post was Fallout 76.
Which has the exact same business model as Elite does, of an up-front cost to play and a "cosmetic"
(at least at first, they made a big deal about that, even as they started adding gameplay affecting stuff which we literally know from the official Prima strategy guide that they'd cut from the base game to sell at a premium) microtransaction store. It just got progressively more egregious over time as Bethesda continued to test the waters of what they could get away with.
This is a trend in the entire industry, One publisher pushes it a bit too far too fast, everyone takes note, stuff gets walked back, and everyone slowly inches back to where that publisher took it with their game, but slowly enough that nobody notices a jarring transition.
And yes, when a game fall down this "Fee-to-Pay" rabbit hole, at some point yes, it absolutely should shift to a Free to Play model. Elite may not be there yet, but it's a very slippery slope.