This is exactly the sort of thing Beth has been moving towards ever since their first ham-handed attempt to monetize mods deservedly blew up in their faces.
They didn't give up on the idea - they just shifted to a strategy of doing it incrementally.
And this is just the latest step in that ongoing process.
Think about how bad it's (very deliberately) going to be by the time TES 6 finally comes out...
Now that the fallout show was a success, they'll probably just put starfield on the backburner and wait till the heat dies down, then make a tv show about it. I'm willing to bet money on this.
I'll admit I've been in that crowd that believed they saw early efforts like horse armor and Bioware's infamous pay-to-continue Dragon Age quests, and backed off - resolving they need to shift monetization elsewhere like skins. Seems I was wrong.
You could argue given Starfield's overall failures, it's still in the sector of terribly-designed monetization that just gets forgotten by history, much like most mobile games. But, we're still in the process of writing that history.