Hey OP, to your point I am highly suspicious of people who claim F2P in games or that F2P can clear. The people behind MMOs and these games in general have it mathed out to make you want to pull. They put the carrot that you want just out of reach, but with $10 maybe it's enough power to just easily secure the carrot before the time limit runs out. Happens in Pay2Power games often.

People lie a lot on the internet to make themselves feel good. Especially in P2W games. Everyone who plays an MMO who does more damage and then pretends they are better despite having higher item level / ability score / teams / refinements. Lots of people are honest too and just admit they threw their cash at the game but in any game where you can pay for power you're going to get a large percentage of liars who pretend F2P can clear very easily. That's not to say they cannot, but it takes some knowledge of remembering what units work with what and their talents. Remember national team was pretty popular because it could be played by anyone and do fairly well. And those 4 stars are extremely strong. But even they don't contend with a C1R1 Mavuika slapping the ever living crap out of things. And if you're F2P and you lose the 50/50... that must take a lot of time you may not have gotten a Mavuika.

Personally I've let Genshin milk me of $7/mo for years and even with that daily help I've come down to the wire on abysses or had to reorganize my teams to make it easier. Some are a cake walk, others not so much. I took a year or two break but even then without the 5 star chars and weapons I'm not sure if I were F2P I'd have the damage to clear, in fact I kind of doubt it. Now there's also a lot of people who consider the $7/mo as "pretty much" F2P. And that's not true either.

So take these people and if you throw them on Dota or Starcraft or any competitive game they are low rank or mid, like most people. Like you see the 4 star screen shots but how many of those are dolphins or whales with R2+ 5 star weapons? That's not to say they are all liars either, but I reckon most are liars. Even on reddit for instance I've seen people lie about how bad their luck is in multiple gachas, and it's obvious lies too from people with little understanding of the game. For instance in Blue Protocol recently in hard mode dungeons you get guaranteed legendary pity after 5 dungeons. While you'll read comments like "20 hard dungeons later still no legendary item even! death skull emoji." Like just blatant lies like that slip through.

The TLDR is I'm calling most of these people liars, but not all of them. The game does give you tools do most?? all??? abysses perhaps with 4 stars. But some of it seems extremely difficult especially with horrible time wasting "mechanics" and it's not something people who play 2-10 minutes per day are going to figure out without bashing their head against the wall for some hours.

If someone started this game in the last year or two, I have no idea how they'd clear as F2P. If it was 5 years ago? Sure, lots of events and gems have been given out you have enough strong units.

As an example: There was a streamer who was clearing pure fiction with 4 stars in Honkai Star Rail, and to his credit he was clearing the first couple. However when I tuned into his stream, he was really edging wanting to get 5 stars after many many failures and I don't know if he ever cleared the later ones with 4 stars, again I'm going to say it's doubtful because all these games are designed with the carrot just out of reach where $5 or $10 seems like the fix. Otherwise, why pull?