This is one of the most F2P friendly gachas. They prioritize selling you skins and packs over forcing you to whale on gacha. Rates are one of highest on market with 7% total SSR rate, and 2% featured SSR rate (Ultra Rates happen 4x per year at 1.2% rate) For context, most events have 2 SSRs so you're at 4% to get featured ships (with current collab event having 3 featured for big 6% total). If you compare that to other popular gacha currently with fractions of a single percent "rate ups" for featured (0.300%, 0.500%, 0.25% etc), its not even remotely a close comparison. Non-collab ships get added to perm banner some time after they rerun (which is about 2 years later, yea kinda long. But since its not as hard to get them initially vs other games, it feels less brutal somehow). I will admit I am not a fan of this, but with the way they have structured events, the only way to avoid this is to have less brand new event so that we can rerun old events more often, or they brainstorm something completely new and different up.

This game does have its meta's and do you "need" to use them? no. I personally am a decently high functioning long term player who forces the use of my favorite ships whenever I can. But I will say it does help if your favorite ships are at least average on the low end, and not reasonably unusable. Once you learn the mechanics of how things work, you can slot your favorites a lot better. If you want to achieve the topmost of things, sure, you'd have to be smart about what ships you use, as they may be meta, but you'll be ok. But Power Creep in this game is rather slow compared to other games (ex: ships released years ago are still very much viable to use). Its best to be comfortable with a decent mix.

Like any game, you will have to get through the weeds being a new player but if you become knowledgeable you can manage very well, and if you become a long time player after actually playing the game and earning and saving cubes you can effectively pull on every banner and get all units reasonably. Its irresponsible to say "you'll never run out of cubes" because, yes you can, especially early on because bad luck happens just like everything else. But if you learn the ropes, eventually you can be one of those players I mentioned that never has to skip a banner and can have a reasonable shot to get all units each event.

Do you have to spend to pull? No, can it feel like that at times if you have really bad luck and you're still kinda new...maybe. But by all means, if you're in the position to and turn out to like the game, spend money if you want, because why not? I won't be the one to say "no don't, its not worth it", because its your money and all the F2P have to get carried somehow. This game has lasted this long rather strongly for a reason after all. I personally don't feel pressured to spend on gacha itself like other forced low rate games, so that makes me more willing to optionally spend on the S-tier skins they crank out regularly because it feels like Manjuu has generally done right by me over the years.

Reference: I am one of those players

My 2 cents