Article without tracking paywall bullshit.

So, the player frustration this quest is inspiring isn’t a straight-up next entry in the long-running paid mods debate that’s been going on within the Bethesda community with regards to the Creation Club for a while now, but rather folks simply being unhappy with the monetisation practices Bethesda’s employing with regards to its own stuff.

I suppose that will be part of it, but it takes a load of willful ignorance to not see that the reason they distribute it this way is to ease people into the idea of using the infrastructure they ultimately set up to monetize other people’s work (i.e. mods).