Personally in the instance of Elite Dangerous, the term P2W is very subjective. I'm no good at PVP so having an allegedly bad --- ship designed for PvP will be a waste (if I were to get it for that purpose). Will I have an advantage over others? Perhaps. Depends on what you're getting with this kitted out ship and even then I'm not sure who or what I have an advantage over. I might however pay for the convenience of not having to do certain things to get said ship i.e. possible A rated Modules, the ship itself without having to grind for credits, etc.
I'm still struggling to see why this upsets anyone whatsoever. If anything, this again pads FDevs coffers to keep the game we all seem to love or at the minimum enjoy, going. I feel this bit of news will not hurt me whatsoever. So those claiming Elite is dead and/or people are paying for some advantage (win) seems rather presumptuous and a tad knee jerky that's all.
Pay-to-Win, or pay-for-an-advantage if you prefer, isn't about PvP. I've seen it numerous times in single-player games.
Look at Surviving Mars, for instance. It's a single-player survival city building game. In the base game, the basic dome includes six "slices," each of which can further be divided into three sections. There are two sizes of buildings: large (one slice), or small (one section), plus some tiny cosmetics. For much of the early- and mid-game, your six slices will include: three residential structures, one "basic services" (clinic and two food service buildings), one productive, and one that provides other services.
For example, in the basic game, in my typical mining dome, I'd have three residences, the basic services slice, a farm, and a bar to help with comfort. In my starting dome, I usually have the "other services" slice include a lab, nursery, and playground... because I don't have anything both small and
useful to place in those other two sections. Usually to reach self sufficiency, I have to expand to three domes: the starting dome (which typically doubles as a mining dome, without the bar for comfort), one dome that supports a machine parts factory, and one dome that supports an electronics factory. These domes won't be as comfortable as they could be, which means that they'll be inefficient due to lower morale, and require a much larger population, because a significiant portion of the population will simply be involved in providing food and services to the productive members of the colony.
But hey! For $20 more, you can get "cosmetics" package, which include
small variants of larger buildings. Now my "basic services" slice can be expanded to include such services as providing luxury and gaming services,
and a bar as well. And since I have access to small factories, I can replace that nursery and playground with small electronics and machine parts factories. Self sufficiency in a single dome, with a much smaller overall population, a much higher productive population, who also enjoy the benefits of higher morale.
Oh! And for another $20, you can get early access to another "cosmetics" package, which will grant you early access to other food production buildings
that you won't have to research to get access to. Want get colonists on the surface of mars as quickly as possible, without the worry of them starving to death? Why wait 20-30 sols until you research the farm, when you can spend a little money and get those colonists on the ground and being productive right away?
In the end, pay-to-win is a predatory monetization strategy. In many games I've played, especially online ones, the development team gradually makes the free gameplay more and more difficult, to make spending money to advance more appealing. A game with great gameplay doesn't need these strategy to earn money, because players will buy the game, and this will pay for additional updates to the game. Numerous single player games, such as Minecraft and No Man's Sky, take this route. Others go the
content DLC route: more maps, more activities, and more assets that are
balanced with the rest of the game.
Elite Dangerous has, to date, gone with pay-to-win DLC: Horizons and Odyssey not only provided new content, but more powerful
capabilities. Horizons, especially, saw a
huge increase in the power of player-owned ships, which both provided a huge advantage over other players (which could affect even solo-players, via the BGS), but also saw in an increase in power of NPC ships to compensate... which either cause base-game players to quit, or purchase Horizons to catch up. Odyssey isn't nearly as bad as Horizons was, but having this expansion still provides adopters with numerous minor advantages over those who own just the base game.
Yesterday's announcement, though rather... ambiguous in syntax, is yet another step towards predatory monitzation. And I, for one, find that alarming.