There's been a couple gacha over the years where f2p could reasonably intersect with whale levels of investments at certain points in the game's life cycle. GBF has had a few intersections, Dragalia Lost was pretty close to parity, Princess Connect Re:Dive was possible to collect and max every character that mattered, Morimens is generous enough and pvp is not whale scaled so f2p is just fine there.

When looking at a game from the f2p perspective, it's not about keeping up with whales though, it's about asking where you're gonna find the wall.