In my experience gacha games will sometimes hold events where you're guaranteed to get something useful for $15 or so, but otherwise you're getting maybe a sing

In my experience gacha games will sometimes hold events where you're guaranteed to get something useful for $15 or so, but otherwise you're getting maybe a single digit chance of getting something useful for ~$20 payments. Some games require you to get duplicates of to make them maximally good, so it's more like go big or go home. If you're truly spending "a few dollars" here and there you're pretty much just throwing money into a fire, even conditioned on you thinking that the possible winnings are potentially useful. Another way to phrase this is that free in game currency for F2P players often represents several hundred dollars of the equivalents you can purchase with actual cash. So if you want to have twice as much resources/units/weapons/whatever as a F2P player you need to be spending a lot of money. A few bucks won't move the needle at all. $60/20 hours is $3 for an hour of entertainment. That's pretty great.