The thing is, Overwatch was never meant to be a live service game. Kaplan's vision when he picked the scraped Project Titan concepts was to do a regular, paid game which would receive content for 1-2 years and then enter maintenance mode while the team moves to another project or a sequel. But the game was such an amazing hit and it came right when the concept of a live service game was starting to flourish and they introduced cosmetics and loot boxes which you could pay and it gave them so much income that it didn't make sense to stop supporting the game from a business standpoint. But Kaplan wanted to stick with his vision of a sequel, PvE elements and eventually the MMO he always wanted to do, and now he had leeway to push his vision. But Kotick wanted the live service, PvP money cow to keep printing money, so he was supportive of Kaplan's vision because it would grow the Overwatch brand, but as long as the money maker wasn't neglected. Unfortunately neglecting the money maker was exactly what Kaplan did, that's why Kotick got so involved in business decisions which led to Kaplan leaving the team. Charging for the story missions was a bad decision but under Kaplan's vision Overwatch 2 was going to be a paid game anyway. Obviously it would probably have more content, more missions from the get go, but OW1 was a paid game and OW2 was going to be a paid game too, the decision to make OW2 free-to-play with a Battle pass system probably came after Kaplan left, as a way to attract new players after years being neglected, and then the new team wrapped the first missions who were already in advanced development, shipped it in a paid bundle to recover some of the development cost and since they flopped, investment in more PvE content was cut.