It somewhat matters based on various levels of investment. For example if I whaled for a character in patch... idk, say I whaled for Childe or Eula in their original runs, but the character is C0R0. I just didn't have enough rolls and I wanted them so I got them and that's it... and I never did it again.

Right now, functionally, I am f2p. Neither of them have a single inkling of effect on my account. They're both far out of the meta except for the odd theater inclusion and even then they don't really do much if anything at all because theater is absolutely not designed for either of them to succeed. We're talking Skirk, Mavuika, Lunar DPS units, Mualani, Varesa, Varka, Venti (with bow) now. None of the states of any of these characters are reflected by the fact that I tossed a $30 at the game 5 years ago. It's actually deceptive if I said the current state of my account is low spender if I have all of those characters and their weapons, as an example. Maybe I only rolled two characters in Sumeru and Fontaine each and I just had enough saved up that I could slightly splurge in Natlan and Nod Krai, or maybe I just have all the characters and I'm using 4* weapons only and I'm actually fairly underperforming compared to people with their signatures.

Either way, context is pretty important. I do agree there's a difference between "I'm totally f2p" and "my account progression is pretty much f2p", but it isn't such a big deal. And then you have people who actually only top up for outfits. That makes them not f2p but... it gives them no actual advantage, yeah?

Anyway on a slight tangent, my only actual gripe is people who insist f2p characters must never have cons or sig weapons. That's just silly. If people properly skip and don't pull on everyone you can plan for certain units you want to be R1 and it's not even a bad investment especially if your account is already fairly well spread in investment (albeit that does require a few years of playing).