As with everything else in video games, whether microtransactions are predatory and exploitative or not depends on how they are used and what you can actually buy with them. If the microtransactions affect the game's balance, giving players tangible gameplay benefits they wouldn't have without them, then they are exploitative and are often the mark of a game being balanced around those microtransactions to make it more difficult to play or progress without paying for them.
I have no issues with cosmetic microtransactions, especially in free to play games where they are often the main way those games make money. However, in $60 dollar AAA games I have absolutely no patience for them. Microtransactions are a symptom of the kind of industry that the AAA developers have themselves created over the last 20 to 30 years. When we get to the point that a game like Assassin's Creed or Battlefield not only has the normal $60 main game, but several special editions often costing several hundred dollars, season passes that cost another $40-60, DLC, advertising tie-ins in-game, and microtransactions among other things, we've long since gone past the point of trying to justify this as a necessary evil to combat the rising costs of development.
Again, this is a situation the industry has themselves created, and if they genuinely can't make a profit selling literally millions, maybe tens of millions of copies of their biggest games, then they don't deserve to in the first place. They are the ones handling their own business poorly at that point. It may be true that costs of development, especially at the high end of development have ballooned out of control over the last decade, but that's once again the industry's own doing. Microtransactions are nothing but yet another desperate attempt to temporarily hide a growing issue without actually addressing the causes of that issue.
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