derogatory terms like Pay to Win or Free to Pay. What baffles me about those criticisms is that, unless I was illegally pirating my games, I would have had to pay to play and win any game!
I think you are being deliberately obtuse here (and elsewhere in this article), for satirical effect (the title is a clue). Nevertheless, let’s go ahead and clarify for the sake of establishing the argument positively rather than by satirical implication:

The complaints levelled are not about the desire of a company for reasonable profit, but that these creations are designed for much larger profits than simply selling the game, and that they destabilise the game environment for the players.

In a ‘Pay to Win’ game, one ends up with a playing environment where the achievements of the players are not based upon skill, but rather upon how much money they have put into the game. In the worst-case-scenario, totally unskilled players can routinely defeat well-skilled players, provided they simply pay the money so to do. It is an affront to a basic meritocratic principle of games: that it is skill at the game itself, and not external, personal wealth, which should determine victors.

In another ‘Pay to Win’ scenario, the game is marketted as being completable using the tools the game provides for free, but in actuality victory is made either impossible or incredibly onerous without the expenditure of money. Here, the problem is the dishonesty of the dev, who ‘hooks’ a player under a false pretense, where money actually is required later, when the player was under the impression that it would not be necessary.

As for ‘Free to Pay’ games, the issue here is that these games are set up not as engines to provide an authentic game experience, but as a means to milk people bit-by-bit for far, far more money than they would normally spend on the game outright (i.e. usually many times in excess of its actual value); often, such games simply do not have an ability to ‘purchase’ the game for precisely this reason. These are actually cynical psychological manipulations of the users, not games at a all, and should be condemned as such. A key feature of such games is that they are based upon feeding compulsions, rather than enjoyment, with the intended result that the user ends up believing that satisfying a compulsion is the same thing as having fun–a cruel perversion of the human experience, with serious ramifications for both the person and for society, made solely to satisfy a developer’s short-term greed.