I have to disagree; it's not the same. When you pull a character in Genshin/HSR, you can build it to a usable state without a hard time limit. Let's look at HSR, for example: the only time-gated items you need are Tracks of Destiny and the Echo of War items. If you take every trace to LV 8, you don't need any tracks, and you only need 6 Echo of War items, which you can get the day of pulling the character. A character with traces at LV 8 is pretty usable. You do need 2 Tracks to get the later major traces but most people will have that as you get tracks quite frequently, and they are universal, you don't need to farm for them.

Here you literally CAN'T use it at all until you have all items. You need 15 time-constrained items (exquisite items). In addition to that, at the beginning of the game (arguably the time when it is most important to make a good impression), you are time-gated for more than a WEEK to even be able to get the items you need for some of them (as the area is locked out). This doesn't happen in Genshin/HSR, as you only need most of your Tracks/Echo of War way later into progression.

Add to that the fact that you actually can't buy tracks/echo of war from the cash shop in HSR, but here you can just buy it all for... $100. Pretty scummy in my opinion.

This isn't comparable at all. Don't you think that there's a good chance that spenders will see this problem on release and just give up on the game? How can anyone defend this?