Heyo! Just another random who's moving over from centralized social media to the Fediverse. Mastodon wasn't too bad but I love anything like Reddit!
Games, anime, Japanese, food, and music are my loves. Fanfic beats food tho, I can read for hours instead!
Some are very easy to play without spending any sort of money, and there's several that have pity systems in which you're guaranteed to get what you're pulling for, so at least they're slightly better than gambling. But yes, I won't deny they're predatory, but I've managed to make my gacha journey without spending a penny across the 20+ gacha games I've played and dropped for a little over a decade now.
Not all of them have great stories, especially the older games which focused on collecting rather than story content, but within the past few years we've gotten great ones that have long arcs that are actually interesting, especially if the game has side lore that you can read about.
I get that a gacha isn't going to be as good as the average game, but when you've only got a few mins to play something and you're out and about, they're nice.