There’s nothing pay-to-win about it. You can pay to unlock warbonds, but you don’t need the warbonds to perform well at the highest difficulty, it really isn’t that hard to get the super credits to unlock a warbond in game, and even once you’ve unlocked the warbond you still need medals to unlock the items in the warbond (which you’ll get while getting enough credits anyway).

If you’re still on the vanilla warbond, focus on unlocking that… You’ll have enough credits for a couple warbonds at least by the time you’ve gotten though a substantial portion of it between the credits in the warbond and just drops that you’ll pick up while playing.

Just… Play to enjoy the game with friends (or randoms), you’ll have those things faster than you think, and pick warbonds that have weapons and strategems that seem interesting to you (can even pick up primary and support weapons from teammates to try them out and see if you’ll like them… Just ask first ;) )