Yeah. You tend to think of them as terminally online shut-ins but there are whales in my group which has semi-frequent active meetups; one woman mentioned she spends £300 a month on the app - god knows how, frankly - but she's probably in the shallow end of the pool, I imagine there are people who put in far more than that.
I'm curious as to whether she still spends that much now that there's a remote raiding limit but tbf with the price increase I imagine you could still spend that amount even taking the limit into account (actually no, just calculated that and buying two packs of 3 raid passes per day would set you back just over £171; still, there's incubators and other items to push that number up).
Outside of RNG-dependent activities like raids and eggs being generally addictive ("one more and I might get a hundo/shiny/shiny hundo!", etc) it relies on FOMO to a great extent. Numerous Pokemon are only available during certain times of the year or in certain events, so it incentivises you to go harder during that short time. When I got back into the game in 2019 after a two-year break, it worked on me: I put resources into a fair few Pokemon thinking "I'll never get a better one than this!" before I realised that pretty much everything comes around again, and that everything initially gated behind a paywall will eventually be free*. Shifting to that mindset made the experience much more enjoyable.
There are a few other aspects of the app which are... sketchy, to put it mildly. A while ago they introduced a "gifting" feature that allows one to buy event tickets for other users. Given the ease with which you can make payments it strikes me that this is open to severe abuse. A friend's brother, for instance, is autistic and highly suggestible and I know for a fact he'd buy me a ticket if I asked him to.
(What actually happened was that someone in our group figured out that if he started an account on the Turkish version of Google Play, he could gift everyone tickets for pennies. That's since been patched though.)
But yeah, there are always going to be types of people who're more susceptible to certain things. Sadly that's not something that'll ever really change but what can change is how and to what extent the laws we put in place mitigate these factors.
Maybe my professional experience has helped in this but it's highly useful to try and think critically about your reaction to all this. I've had several moments of realising "oh, that marketing tactic works on me" over the years. Can't always guarantee it's made me better at resisting them but awareness is the first step.
Anyway. Now I really am getting off topic so I'll try to make this the last thing I say about this.
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*The most notable example probably being the decision to put Galarian Mr Mime behind a ticket costing £8 (or thereabouts)
